TEXNIC® X Yeon Jinyeong

One of the world’s largest lithium reserves lies in the Atacama Desert.
This region stands at the forefront of the lithium mining industry, a critical source of raw material for electric vehicle batteries. At the same time, it is a space of crisis for indigenous communities whose land, water, and way of life are being threatened and lost.

This collaboration begins from this “invisible landscape.”
Artist Jin-Young Yeon focuses not on the front-facing image of technology and progress but on the realities unfolding behind it.

Technological advancement often operates on a foundation of sacrifice. While we talk about a “sustainable future” enabled by electric vehicles and batteries, the disappearing communities, depleted water resources, and destroyed ecosystems behind these developments are easily overlooked.

As artist Jin-Young Yeon reminds us, “When we gain something in the name of progress and the future, we must not forget that something is also being lost at the same time.”

TEXNIC® is a brand that transforms battery separators — a core component of electric vehicle batteries — into fabric.
Although these separators are fundamental to the EV industry, once discarded, they become waste material.

By using TEXNIC® fabric in this collaboration, a cyclical narrative is created: lithium mining → batteries → separators → waste → fabric.

Artist Jin-Young Yeon deeply incorporates both the technical background and the symbolic value of this material throughout her work.
She translates this industrial textile into an emotional language without overexplaining or artificially embellishing its meaning. Instead, she distills it into minimal visual forms and structures, allowing “everything to be revealed without needing to be spoken.”

No extra materials were used in the structures, and all supporting components were designed in an extremely minimal way. Here, sustainability is expressed not through words but through structure itself.

This work is not intended to romanticize industrial frameworks or to celebrate future technologies. Rather, artist Jin-Young Yeon focuses on the realities unfolding behind the facade of industrial progress.
As technology advances and industries expand, we gain much — but equally, we lose much. This project was built to confront those silent losses, refusing to turn away from the traces and voids left behind.

Through the interconnected flow of electric vehicles, batteries, lithium mining, and discarded separators, the artist aims to face the marks left by industrial progress and to question what we see and what we choose to overlook.

This collaboration differs from conventional intersections of art and technology. It is not a sensory reinterpretation or a polished image; instead, it embeds emotion, technology, sustainability, and narrative directly into the structure itself.

On TEXNIC®'s fabric — infused with its unique technology — Jin-Young Yeon’s perspective weaves a quiet question that confronts the truths often missed by industry.
In standing before this question, we encounter something far more fundamental than the familiar word “sustainability.”

*BTN with Artist is a collaborative project that explores new possibilities of TEXNIC® fabric together with creators who surprise the world with their unconventional works.