MORE CARNAGE FEATURED: JENNY PING LAM LIN - “THE GARBAGE”
Who gets to decide what is worthless?
And what happens to a child—an entire generation—when the world insists they are debris before they ever learn to breathe?
Jenny Ping Lam Lin’s The Garbage doesn’t arrive quietly. It doesn’t ask permission. It confronts you with a cold, metallic truth: value is a story told by the powerful, and its fallout is written on the bodies of the young.
The work begins in the landfills—mountains of discarded electronics, screens stacked like regimented soldiers, or perhaps students lined up for a graduation photo they never asked to be in. These images echo the architecture of an oppressive educational system: controlled, orderly, humming with unspoken fear. There is a terrible beauty in their arrangement, a beauty that feels coerced, disciplined, shaped by institutions that confuse pressure with love and obedience with success.
But Jenny doesn’t stop at documentation; she destabilizes the very categories we cling to. Waste becomes portrait. Portrait becomes confession. Confession becomes indictment. The meticulous compositions expose the absurd fragility of value itself—how easily a young person can be called “garbage,” how quickly a machine turns obsolete, how both continue to carry silent histories long after they’re thrown away.
This is why The Garbage belongs in MORE CARNAGE.
It tears at the myth of meritocracy. It exposes the violence of expectation. It refuses the polished narrative of achievement that so many East Asian students are forced to embody. The work risks sentimentality and falls instead into revelation—showing us a world where the discarded still pulse with life, where refuse becomes mirror, where degradation breeds a fierce, unexpected tenderness.
Nothing here disappears.
Everything returns—louder, truer, dirtier, more human.
ABOUT JENNY PING LAM LIN
Jenny Ping Lam Lin is a visual artist whose work examines the emotional pressures and social hierarchies shaping contemporary East Asian life. Through photography, she explores the expectations placed on youth—especially women—and the ways these forces fracture identity and self-worth. Her recent series, The Garbage, uses waste as metaphor to confront oppressive educational systems and the quiet devastation they leave behind. Across her practice, Lam Lin turns overlooked emotional debris into evidence, insisting that vulnerability is neither refuse nor failure but truth made visible.
