Paper cups are the preferred tool of modern beggars: a free and readily available container for their destitution. That is why I use them to make imprints in my painting series Paper Cups.

Constantin Brâncuși’s sculpture Endless Column—whose form this stacked structure of paper cups might evoke—can, in retrospect, be seen as a pinnacle of modernism. That movement was sustained by a shared belief in progress, in the conviction that modernity would ultimately produce a utopian society in which poverty would be eradicated.

Yet in today’s postmodern condition, it is disparity and inequality that seem endless.