RETAINED

“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.