Shoji Yamasaki just wants you to pick up your fucking trash

Shoji Yamasaki, better known as @litteredmvmnts, is the kind of artist who doesn’t mind getting down and dirty – literally. Based in Los Angeles, his practice begins where most of us avert our eyes: at the curb’s edge, tangled in freeway weeds, in the jittery twitch of a plastic bag. He submits to the wind as the choreographer, letting wrappers, bottles, and scraps of foil step into the role of dancers – improvised, fragile, unsettingly graceful. 

It’s funny, yes – watching a man contort and wrestle the air in sync with a flimsy candy wrapper – but it’s also disarming. Trash is the most democratic of materials: we all create it, we all coexist with it. It charts our habits, exposes our appetites, maps the quiet violence of consumer culture. By embodying its movements, Yamasaki forces a reckoning – waste doesn’t disappear when discarded; it lingers, restless, an extension of ourselves. 

His work is both playful and awkward, but also tender in its attention (his keen eye and impeccable styling have landed him collaborations with Paloma Wool, for instance). Each duet reframes inanimate objects as mirrors, collaborators, reminders that life is carried by motion itself – from the shiver of dividing cells to gravitational pulls. To watch his work is to be confronted with the cyclicity of life and waste alike, and to be provoked into a simple, urgent gesture: to notice what we throw away, and to use our dainty little chronically online fingers to just pick! it! up! 

Hi! First things first – how are you today? What’s been on your mind?
I’m okay, I just woke up. As to what’s on my mind…I still have a lot of things to do. Every week comes pretty quickly, and I’ve been trying to keep track of all my videos by putting everything in an Excel sheet. I try to be very organised, but the week passes me by, and I always have to look for trash. Everywhere I go, I’m always scouting for trash, figuring out what videos to make, and what to wear to match the trash.

I imagine you also can’t just walk down the street without constantly paying attention to your surroundings.
It’s also hard because, especially in LA, we’re driving everywhere, and I would see such amazing trash from my car. But I’m usually driving on a freeway and I can’t stop, so I keep passing by and thinking, “oh that’s the one”. But you just have to keep on going. 

Ah sorry, can’t relate to this with my privilege of living in a walkable city.
Yeah, I’m just thinking about it now, but maybe LA is so littered because there’s a lot less consciousness of trash in people’s surroundings as you can’t really walk. You don’t ever have to step out of your car. 

I imagine streets become so impersonal, and it makes sense you might not want to invest in a clean space or really pay attention to your environment.
Yeah, and take Japan as an example. There’s not a lot of littering, and I feel that’s because there’s a consciousness of our surroundings, and they want to keep their community clean. I’m not saying there’s no littering in Japan, but I do think there’s more awareness surrounding trash there than, say, LA, because it’s more walkable. 

You mentioned that you often drive past the trash that’s “the one”. What is the it-factor about the piece that calls to you?
All my trash goes through a very strict audition process. They all have to be inorganic, synthetic, and man-made materials. Movement is a huge part, so the trash has to be able to move in some way. But also, it’s a one-person job, and I have to keep my camera stable to record myself, so the trash cannot move in and out of the frame.  We’re always stuck in traffic here, and people keep throwing out trash from their cars, and I see so much potential in the pieces. There are a lot of cars moving past and so much more wind being generated because of that, and I see trash just wailing around or being stuck in some weed on the side or something. I see so many gems.

Have you ever stepped out of your car to record it?
No. I always get tempted, but it’s so dangerous. You don’t want to ever leave your car on a freeway. LA drivers are crazy.

I can imagine, haha. But I’m itching to know, how did this idea of imitating trash come up? What was the very start of the process like?
So this whole project started right at the end of 2020. As you know, COVID was a thing, and the only thing we could do was walk around. I’m a dancer and choreographer, so I’m naturally very keen on movement. I think dance was so much more impacted than other creative departments since we rely heavily on the presence of the audience, and they weren’t allowed to be in theatres. So I was just walking around the neighbourhood, trying to figure out my life, and I’d always find litter moving around and doing its thing. At one point, this Katy Perry song played in my head, and I thought, “What if I embodied that trash moving, how would that feel?” When I first started, I would make these little vignettes of about three/four minutes, imitating different bits of trash, one after the other. I thought to myself that if nature is the choreographer and I’m the dancer, how would the dynamic change? Then I went to the California Institute of the Arts for my Master’s, and I did a little installation, imitating the trash I found at the art school. After I graduated, I had all this content still on my computer that I never put out there, and I decided to make those snippets. It didn’t go viral at first, but eventually it started to gain momentum.

Katy Perry can do that to you. Did you expect it to go so viral?
Not really. It happened with the hovering trashbag, and the one with the aluminium foil –  those bumped me up into the virality world. I was planning on posting these videos in batches, and I had these two batches coming out. I decided that if nothing happens with posting these videos, I’m done, and then of course, those are the ones that went viral. Right now, I think it’s like 3.6 million views or something, and I’m like, okay, something’s happening, so maybe I should continue this.

Has your creative process changed since the start of it all?
I wouldn’t say it’s changed. I have very strong parameters within my work – from the trash that I’m searching for, to the way I record myself, making sure that the movement is similar to the video of the trash. I’d say I’m even more selective about my trash. There are so many different characters with trash I’m finding, which is so interesting. There’s always the one that’s like really shy trash, where it’s pulling these crazy moves, and as soon as I start recording it, it suddenly stops moving, and I’m like.. okay. And that’s another thing, I’m always fighting with the wind. I’m like, wind, you better do something to this trash and make it move, but the trash is still very shy. But then there are ones that just don’t care, and they just keep dancing crazily, even when I’m recording it. Some trash I call the runners. They are usually flattened, and when the wind blows, they just dash away. Some of the runners I let go of because I can’t be chasing trash all the time. It’s very different, all these characters of trash. I feel like I’m in a gaming world surrounded by different characters that you can recognise. All the trash I use, I always make sure to collect and discard afterwards. 

That’s amazing. Do you feel you form a kind of relationship with these characters? Do you ever chat?
Yeah, I do talk to them. Sometimes I’m just in a spot for 10 minutes, and I encourage the trash to do its thing, and of course, people are walking by and looking at me crazy. I usually record for two minutes or so. I feel like some wildlife photographer in Antarctica waiting for that perfect shot. That’s kind of who I am with trash, just waiting for it to move in some way. There was this one pink trash that was flipping, but as soon as I hit record, it stopped. Then, at the last couple seconds when I was gonna turn off my camera – counting down to 10 to my little trash – and then it did a little move and I was like, “Oh, pleasure doing business with you”.  So a lot of times it’s a conversation, and it’s interesting to try to develop that connection. I actually used to rescue abandoned rabbits for 15 years.

Rabbits?
Yeah. In the US, it’s a big thing to buy baby rabbits for Easter for kids, and then after a few months, when bunnies get big and reach sexual maturity, they just get dropped in a park. It’s a huge problem. But one of the interesting things about rabbits is that they communicate with their body language. They’ll move their bodies in different positions, rub their chins on objects to mark their territory, or do happy dances, and I found myself trying to communicate with rabbits through similar body language. It felt like it was so much more like dancing to me because the expression comes from and through your body. I could connect with the aspect of this with bunnies. Connecting with an inanimate object like trash resonated with me similarly, because of the mimicry I incorporate into it. As an audience member, it may be hard to just connect with trash that’s moving on the side of the street, but as soon as you incorporate a human body into it, you kind of create this triangular connection. The audience is also connecting to me as a human body in movement, and then in turn connecting with the trash.

For sure. Ever since I came across your work, I feel like I’ve become more aware of the trash I see on the streets. Have you had any notable reactions or heard ways that your work has impacted people?
As an artist, I feel like it’s our duty to shift the audience’s perspective on everything that’s around us. I do get people messaging me that they’ve started picking up trash on their way home, or taking more notice of it. I think it got people to see it differently. Now, every time they see trash that’s moving, they will think of me and this whole project. I’m very grateful that people are noticing it. While I don’t think one person can change the world in drastic ways, we can always influence others and create a ripple effect that allows people to shift their daily habits and become a little bit more environmentally conscious. After all, we only have this planet Earth. You and I may both live far away, but we only have this earth to call home, and this is a fundamental, universal thing. And while we might not speak the same language or have the same culture, we both produce some kind of waste, especially plastic waste, which is a huge problem. Trash going to the landfill isn’t going to solve everything; it’s so much deeper than just that. I can’t even wrap my head around it. But I think my work is still a work in progress of unravelling a lot of things.

I suppose waste is one of the most universal things there is. 

One thing I’d love to do would be to travel around the world and look at trash from different countries and see if they move differently. Seeing so many comments from people all around the world connecting to my work was a true testament to me. It’s also saying a lot about how people are connecting with the plastic bag, ranging from Asia to Africa. The fact that they are connected to it also means that it must be somewhere near them, in their very community. It’s interesting to see these connections, and I realised I didn’t really need to go anywhere; the world came to me to connect with my work, and it’s beautiful to see that. 

You’ve also filmed in Japan a lot, have you noticed a difference between the trash there and in LA?
That was what I was trying to figure out at first. The language on it is different, but overall, it’s all made out of plastic or mylar, so for me, it’s all the same. Even the plastic, which comes from fossil fuel, which in turn comes from the earth. Maybe if it were from a different planet, it would move differently, I don’t know. 

I also love that you call your pieces ‘duets’. It feels like a form of anthropomorphising – elevating that piece of trash we’re taught to disregard, to a companion or partner. What is that approach for you?
I think it just goes back to the way of finding that connection again by combining the inanimate object, which is the trash, the animated object that is me, and then having that third person, which is the audience member. Creating that triangle connection is the most important part of this work, and if it were only either/or, it just wouldn’t work. I was initially calling it a pas de deux, referring to the dance act where two people are dancing together in ballet. Just like my search for trash, a lot of creators search for whatever content they want to duet, with one half not being their own. But for me, they’re both my own, and so it’s twice the work. Anyways, initially, the duet thing came from that TikTok feature where people can duet with each other’s content.

For me, the first association with the word ‘duet’ comes from more institutionalised connotations of dance, and the elitism and rigidity surrounding that.
That’s interesting, and also a good point. I have to marinate on that. My idea of this originated from TikTok, but I recognise the layers of the word duet. I feel like people do elevate dance and put it on a pedestal – the costumes, having to go to the theatre to see these professional dancers, the lighting, and all that. But dance is also all around us, and I’m trying to allow people to see that there’s so much to dance and movement than you realise. From how we’re born, the act of cells separating and the DNA rippling, even on a microscopic level, it’s all choreography that shapes our entire body. On a macro level, with the rotation of the sun, it goes through space in a choreography of planets. And this, of course, affects us, creating different seasons and has us dress differently depending on them. So it’s all kinds of costumes, and when you connect with nature, these things are brought to the forefront.  

That’s such a beautiful reminder. There is so much constant movement and choreography inside our bodies necessary just to keep us alive. But speaking of costumes, I’m also curious about the styling in your videos – it’s always such a perfect match ot the trash. What is the process of selecting your pieces? Would you say you’re into fashion?
I wouldn’t consider myself to be in the world of fashion, but I am finding myself being hurled into that world in so many ways. Especially when I’m collaborating with brands like Paloma Wool, which I did last year, or working along with photographers who are also in the world of fashion. I used to not care about clothes; I would just slap them on my body and walk out – it didn’t matter what I looked like. But a lot of the inspiration now comes from trash, and it’s still not about looking good, but more about the silhouette and colour combination. I also try to make sure that I don’t use any tape or glue when I’m attaching things to my body – using only safety pins so I don’t produce more waste. All the clothing you see in my videos is also from my closet, and I always try to rearrange how I can wear something so that it will look similar to the object I’m trying to imitate.

That’s really impressive. On a final note, do you see yourself venturing into doing duets with other objects or animals at all?
At this moment, no, just because I’m trying to call attention to trash. And I don’t feel the need to imitate trees or animals because they are all organic and they will eventually return back to earth. But the trash that we produce will stay, and I want to circle in on that, using my own body. If I went and imitated a tree, what is that calling to? Go hug a tree? I want to use this platform to be able to connect with people and spread awareness that trash is such a huge problem in this world. Clean up after yourself. Pick up your trash. Simple as that. 

Mic drop.