RETAINED
Park Mi-sook
Chinatown Soup is pleased to present RETAINED, one day only, on Thursday, October 1, 2026, from 12:00–7:00 pm EDT.
"Make sure no notes about him working hard are retained."
No notes about his hard work were supposed to be retained. Yet his mother's notes fill every wall.
Behind the seamless speed of next-day delivery lies an unseen human cost. In October 2020, 27-year-old Jang Deok-jun died following 16 months of continuous overnight shifts at Coupang (NYSE: CPNG), often called the "Amazon of Korea," a death officially certified as an industrial accident caused by chronic overwork.
Years later, leaked executive messages revealed corporate leadership ordering: "Make sure no notes about him working hard are retained!" Coupang denied the allegations, stating the records were distorted.
Refusing corporate erasure, his mother, Park Mi-sook, reviewed hundreds of hours of warehouse surveillance footage frame-by-frame, hand-mapping the facility and logging over 41,000 footsteps to prove the lethal toll of algorithmic pacing.
This October, her evidentiary archive arrives in Lower Manhattan.
Exhibition information
- Presented by: Chinatown Soup in collaboration with Grassroots Labor Advocates
- Venue: Chinatown Soup, 16B Orchard St, New York, NY 10002
- Transit: Grand St Station (B, D) / East Broadway Station (F)
- Admission: Free and open to the public
- Filming notice: A documentary crew from South Korean public broadcaster MBC will be filming on-site.
Schedule
- Gallery exhibition: 12:00–5:30 pm EDT
- Roundtable dialogue and gallery talk: 6:00–7:00 pm EDT, featuring Park Mi-sook alongside local labor advocates and warehouse workers. Full lineup TBA.
