This work shares a couple of things in common with Nissho’s Garbage. First, the dark tones. Here, they create an eerie mood when combined with the open manhole. The second is the depiction of rusty steel, with the pipe lying on the ground, cold and hard. Cho Yang Gyu may have had more influence on Nissho’s early painting style than any other artist. He was born in 1928 in Korea, then under Japanese colonial rule. To escape government pressure on him in 1948, he fled Korea as a stowaway on a ship to Japan. In his paintings, he often used warehouses and manholes as motifs to represent the harsh reality faced by those living on the fringes of a capitalist society. Jo also represented people’s sense of being trapped and isolated through the depiction of hard objects. His work was critically acclaimed, but after repatriating to North Korea in 1960, Cho Yang Gyu was never heard from again.