An Excuse to Play — Considering the State of Zines Today through PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE
PLASTIC PRODUCT, "PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE : 02 FRIDGE", book cover
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the zine revival has gathered momentum year after year. Each year feels like it must be the peak, yet the momentum shows no sign of slowing down.
Zines are not made by individuals alone. Companies and brands make them too. This is neither a new development nor something that began only recently. Yet the current landscape surrounding zines seems to have taken on a different character from that of the DIY media of the past or the art zines seen around art book fairs in the 2010s. The word “zine” no longer denotes a particular genre or attitude; its scope is broader than ever.
A Dictionary, or a Soft Brick
The Korean fashion label and collective PLASTICPRODUCT has also been developing a publishing project titled PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE in recent years.
In an earlier interview, creative director Mincheol Seo described the project as follows:
“For each issue, we select a single subject that ‘shares a sensibility with plastic’ and produce a zine composed solely of around 1,000 photographs, without using any text at all.”*
In 2022, the label published PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE : 01 SILVER CAR, a collection of photographs of silver cars. This was followed in 2025 by PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE : 02 FRIDGE, which contains photographs of refrigerators. With around 1,000 images in each volume, the books naturally possess a considerable physical mass. They are objects resembling dictionaries—or perhaps soft bricks.
"PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE : 01 SILVER CAR" and "PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE : 02 FRIDGE"
As the director’s description suggests, the books contain no explanatory text, leaving readers to interpret them from only a handful of clues. (The first volume, however, comes with a separate booklet containing a short story about plastic.)
Yet although I use the word “interpret,” these are not books that present puzzles to be solved. The connection between subject and image is so simple that it leaves little room for deeper interpretation. The photographs show cars, or refrigerators. Nothing more, nothing less.
The photographs are not elaborately composed. They appear to have been taken with smartphones or compact digital cameras, with the subject generally centred in the frame. The volume on cars occasionally includes close-up details, but its approach is largely detached. The photographs are presented matter-of-factly, accompanied by coordinates indicating where they were taken. Although the models and backgrounds vary, repetition gradually brings into view the different uses of silver cars in society and the associations we attach to them.
Spread from "PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE : 01 SILVER CAR"
The photographic method remains unchanged in the volume on refrigerators, but the images carry a somewhat greater sense of emotional resonance.
Unlike the volume on cars, the only guide provided here is not a set of coordinates but numbers that presumably indicate the time each photograph was taken. Refrigerators linked to different moments of the day. The times you opened one while deciding what to cook, while looking for a late-night snack or a cold drink, or while talking to someone over your shoulder as you searched through its contents—the pairing of photographs and time is extremely simple, yet it evokes memories of the many everyday situations in which we open a refrigerator.
Spread from "PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE : 02 FRIDGE"
Like a car, a refrigerator is a tool. But whereas a car extends the body and enables movement, a refrigerator is connected to food and therefore directly to the sustenance of life. Having someone see inside your refrigerator can sometimes feel like exposing an embarrassing private side of yourself. Yet I found myself less interested in its voyeuristic appeal than in the images produced by the conjunction of refrigerators and time.
Branding of the Gaze and the Amateur Aesthetic
Still, a question arises. Should I really be reading these books this seriously?
This is not a doubt about the quality of the work. Rather, it is a concern about the act of overreading extremely simple things and inflating their interpretation. Perhaps I find myself asking this because the project carries the word “zine.” To be clear, I do not mean to belittle the zine as a medium. Yet zines today remain associated with something to be enjoyed casually rather than studied with great seriousness.
This is not a book that analyses its subjects through sociological research or critical texts. Nor can it necessarily be said that turning these subjects into a work gives us an entirely new way of seeing them. The refrigerators and silver cars are less objects newly opened to interpretation than materials selected to communicate the sensibility of the PLASTICPRODUCT brand. The repetition, absence of text, sheer volume and deliberately uncontrived manner of photography do not so much open up the meaning of the subjects as demonstrate the taste involved in recognising them as interesting.
In that sense, what lies at the centre of the book is not a critical engagement with its subjects, but the branding of a way of seeing.
Of course, that should not simply be dismissed. For a brand today, its world is no longer created through products, logos and visual imagery alone. What does it notice, collect and find interesting? And how does it translate those choices into images shaped by a particular aesthetic? The contours of a brand are formed through the sharing of such ways of seeing. This book is precisely a medium through which that gaze is made visible and material.
Spread from "PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE : 02 FRIDGE"
One thing worth noting here is the aesthetic of early-2000s digital snapshots that has, for some time now, also been visible on Instagram. I have discussed the formalisation and reproduction of the “amateur-style snapshot” in greater detail in an earlier article on shishashin, or “I-photography”, which readers may also wish to consult.
What if these photographs had been taken with a large-format camera or a camera equipped with a large sensor? What if they had been made with the rigour of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological method, under perfectly controlled compositions and conditions? Or what if they had been shot in a snapshot style using a compact film camera?
The resulting work would probably be far removed from the intention of this project. It does not attempt to document its subjects with sociological precision. Nor does it foreground the expressive force of photography. Instead, it selects these particular subjects from countless possible motifs and photographs them in a deliberately uncalculated manner: technically crisp, yet smartphone-like and anti-dramatic, in the style of everyday documentary snapshots. They are not a group of amateurs. Had their aim been sociological research, they could have chosen professional equipment and methods capable of rendering every detail with precision. But they chose not to.
What to select. How far to leave it unrefined. How much to leave unexplained. How close to meaninglessness it should appear. By calibrating these choices, PLASTICPRODUCT shares its sensibility with particular generations and audiences through a common visual language.
Why a Zine?
Why, then, commit the money and labour required to turn into a book something that could so easily remain on Instagram?
Each younger generation grows up amid a different set of assumptions and conditions. Taking photographs, sharing them, preserving them and presenting them have all become ordinary activities within a digital environment. For this very reason, the meaning of making a book has also changed.
To regard the recent zine boom as merely a reinterpretation or update of an earlier culture is therefore to misunderstand its nature. Nor can it be fully explained as a return to materiality or an expression of nostalgia. The resurgence of zines since the pandemic, in particular, must be grounded in assumptions fundamentally different from those underlying earlier zine cultures.
The zine is no longer a means of widely distributing information. It is neither the most effective way to communicate an urgent appeal nor the most innovative vehicle for aesthetic expression. The internet has long since taken over many of these functions. If the only aim is to show photographs, Instagram will suffice. If it is to communicate words, social media or the blogging platform note will do. If it is to explain a brand, there are websites and lookbooks.
If zines nevertheless continue to proliferate, perhaps what remains lies outside their function as a medium. Namely, their capacity to serve as a space for experiments like this one, and their role as an excuse to play.
View of the venue at Zine Festival Kanazawa, photographed by the author
Zines today do not necessarily presuppose a clear message or critical position. A zine can be a body of work, a diary, a brand book, a fragment of research, and at the same time nothing more than play. Perhaps it is precisely this ambiguity and breadth that allow zines to accommodate the somewhat chaotic conditions of the current boom.
PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE offers a clear picture of where the zine stands today.
The book can be read deeply. But it should first be looked through with the casual ease of scrolling a screen. Silver cars continuing endlessly. Hundreds of refrigerators appearing one after another. The humour of repetition, and the unexpected feeling of recognition that emerges from it.
Paradoxically, rather than arranging images digitally and explaining their meaning or context, simply making a physical book allows a game or experiment to take shape more readily. To turn something one finds interesting into a book while leaving that interest intact. The simple and elemental pleasure and practicality of doing so may be precisely the new appeal that draws people to zines today.
Article by Yukihito Kono (29 July 2026)
* Mincheol Seo’s remarks are quoted from an interview published by HYPEBEAST Japan.
https://hypebeast.com/jp/2026/5/plasticproduct-korea-fasion-brand-interviews
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Title: PLASTIC PRODUCT ZINE : 02 FRIDGE
Artist: PLASTIC PRODUCT
Publisher: PLASTIC PRODUCT, 2025
Format: Softcover
Size: 120 × 180 mm
Pages: 928
Language: n/a
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 979-11-974456-4-4
▶︎ Purchase online
https://www.iack.online/products/plastic-product-zine-02-fridge