I mean, you know, it's funny, people text me or email me photos of garbage all the time, (notification) which, I think might be rude for other people.

For me, it's flattering.

It just means they're walking by garbage and thinking, well, they're thinking about it, you know, and then they're thinking about me, and that I got them to think about it.

Every time someone sees an artwork or an image, even if it's online or in person, you're just, like planting these seeds.

And then hopefully they grow and people will think about them later or stop and consider things they would have normally just walked by.

I got this amazing donation of all these plants.

They were going to be thrown out, actually.

And this is the kind of stuff that happens to me where people say, oh, call sTo, you know, he'll probably take them.

And it's true, you know, when someone says, we have a couple thousand dollars worth of plants.

Can we bring them over?

You say, yeah, bring them over.

My name is sTo Len.

And I'm an artist, investigator, dreamer, explorer.

You know, I've never necessarily collaborated with plants.

It's so fun for me.

I mean, it's also a great counterpoint to a lot of the work that I was doing with waste and trash.

Before this, I, did a residency on a landfill in Kyrgyzstan.

When it comes to the climate crisis, there's different jobs that need to be done.

You know, there's people, trying to changepolicies.

There's people, in government, there's people on the streets, on the front lines.

And then there's art, too.

And I think that's like a valid lane to take because we need images, We need visuals to communicate what's happening in the world.

That happens to be what I'm, obsessed with, you know, is like, how do you create an image that's beautiful, but is talking about some real stuff?

Some fresh spinach from my crisper.

Recently, I was asked to do an exhibition at the Queens Botanical Garden.

I went to visit and they have cool little gallery.

But was most interesting to me was the garden itself.

I basically asked them if I could have a residence, in the garden, which they hadn't necessarily considered, but were game.

So this process, what's fun is that I had no idea this existed.

And I just walked into the education department and they were teaching a class on plant pigment.

They're taking any kind of plant and grinding it up.

I'm going to add some alcohol to it.

And the alcohol helps to extract the pigment.

And so this class they were teaching, it's based on a process called the anthotype, which is an early photographic process that used only plants, to create the emulsion.

They basically made, like a photogram, in the shape of a leaf.

What I had thought about was, oh, what if I took a transparency of an image and put that out in the sun?

This is the good stuff right here.

And now we have this pretty awesome green ink.

For my show at the Queens Botanical Garden, it's all prints made with this process.

I look to art to kind of be, in a way, my guiding light.

as a person who sort of felt a little bit outside of everything, you know.

I grew up...

I'm half Vietnamese, right.

So I grew up as a mixed person in America.

And, you know, you sort of never really feel like you fit in anywhere Around 2015, I started to really feel a disconnection with Vietnam.

My family had all moved during the war or after the war and, you know, were basically uninterested in going.

I booked a solo trip.

The first thing I wanted to do was get on the water.

I went out on the Saigon River.

What was really emotionally intense was how polluted the water was when I got there.

I kind of process the world through creating, so I immediately wanted to make work about what I was witnessing.

I've always loved printmaking.

I'm really a terrible printmaker because I'm not perfect.

I'm really messy.

I can't do the same thing over and over.

When I discovered printmaking with water, it sort of blew my mind.

It's like it just knocked down the walls of my studio.

All of a sudden, I could be on a boat making art.

I could be in the water making art.

I could just be out in the world and creating work there.

The boat is a small boat, so I have really good access to the water, but, you know, it's tight quarters and it's precarious.

I have a big wet, toxic piece of paper blowing in the wind.

You know, I'm trying not to have it, like, slap in my face.

I'm trying not to fall in the river.

The whole thing is a bit of a dance.

I started to think more and more about the waterways around me.

Living in New York City with the proximity to all these waterways that we can't swim in, that we can't fish in, it starts to get you.

I remember just hanging out on a hot summer day, like wanting to go swimming so bad, but, you know, you really can't go swimming in the East River.

And why?

So we're at the Newtown Creek.

This is a three and a half mile tributary.

If you go this way about two and a half miles, you'll hit the East River.

This is like, right in my backyard, but what is that place?

What really happened there?

There's so many amazing, sordid industrial histories of the New York City waterways.

I knew that the water, it looked like an oil spill sometimes, especially after heavy rainfall.

This print, in particular, is from the Newtown Creek.

If you were to sort of, test this, you'd probably find sewage.

You'd probably find different types of forever chemicals and other types of things that wind up in our waterways.

But the creek is, it's a special place.

When I look at other water bodies and other abused landscapes, I look for the beauty and I look for, some sort of way to reclaim it while bringing attention to what we've done to it.

I like to dive into a place, embed and soak up what's happening, talk to people, learn, listen, and then respond with some kind of artwork or activation.

I've basically been in residence somewhere for like the last six years.

Being a New Yorker now for a few decades, New York's Sanitation Department is such an essential aspect of life here.

When there was an open call to be an artist in residence, I really jumped at the chance.

This is the world's largest sanitation department.

You've got 10,000 employees.

They're dealing with 12,000 tons of garbage a day.

It's a lot to wrap your head around, you know?

But, I spent probably the first six months just shadowing employees, going to garages, riding on the trucks.

Visited the incinerator in Newark, New Jersey that we use.

And then along the way, you know, I found a silkscreen studio full of designs from the Sanitation Department.

These are my own remixes of these older poster campaigns.

And what was fun for me was to show not only the public, but the workers themselves.

I got to, reintroduce the workers to these old designs.

When you're doing the job, there's a little time to reflect.

And it was in that moment that I kind of realized, as an artist in residence, I could reflect.

For the Department itself, but also for the public.

And then while I was there, someone told me about this TV studio in the Sanitation Department.

They were just like, yeah, you like old stuff.

And I went and checked it out, and, I mean, it was like full of hundreds of films and videos.

♪ Singing a song of sanitation.

Take it away!

♪ So I began to digitize.

I think I digitized like 500 hours of footage, the oldest The oldest going back to 1903.

And going basically 1903 to 2003.

And the footage is amazing.

I mean, you see the history of New York City through the lens of garbage.

Even the ecological conscious of the public changes over decades.

I mean, so much of New York is built on garbage.

At the Queens Botanical Garden, that is in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, was all landfill.

Even if you go back to The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald talks about it as the "valley of ashes."

That was all a big ash dump.

It's just fascinating to me to go to these types of sites and think about what they were.

We're here in the greenhouse at Queens Botanical Garden and this has kind of been my makeshift studio.

It's been the darkroom, or the lightroom, as it were, which is where I can develop these images.

It's like taking them out of the oven.

So, this is an image from the original Queens Botanical Garden, which was an exhibit at the World's Fair in 1939.

Let it cook a little more.

Gardens are very radical, you know.

I mean, these are like activist spaces.

There's volunteer-run composting.

There's people learning how to grow food.

There's people using outdoor space, to do things, and kind of come together.

This piece is called "Worms Do It Better.

Don't Cut Compost."

It's in response to the unfortunate budget cuts in New York City, which cut all funding to composting.

One of the things that I started doing was looking through the archives.

I love doing that because usually archives in a space are locked away.

No one's really thinking about them.

And it's a time where I can, really pull the history out, I love kind of finding these sort of images in the archive that, you know, when taken out of context, are super bizarre.

It sort of encapsulates what I want to do with these prints, which is pull from the past, pull that into the present, and honor the legacy of this place, but also honor the work that it takes to create a place like a garden or to create a community space.

It's all kind of connected, I think.

The garden, working in the Sanitation Department.

I think that throughline, it makes a lot of sense for me as someone who's just kind of been interested in the decay of society and wanting to make something with that.

All of that is super important, I think, to my work and I think to a whole new generation of artists, honestly, who are responding to the world and responding to, the urgent things happening in the world.

All that stuff, it ends up soaking into who you are and what you do and finds its way coming out in the artwork in different ways.

I'm like a big sponge and just squeeze me out occasionally, you know?

And then there you go.

There's some new art.