This paper examines Choi Jeong-hwa's critical engagement with the changing natures of the urban environment in the 1990s. Renowned as the established leader of Korean Pop Art, Choi Jeong-hwa has appropriated crude, cheap, and mass-produced objects from the everyday environment for making art. His strategy of 'kitsch' appropriation has been interpreted as either a subversive gesture to high art seriousness or a social commentary on Korea's hasty modernization in general. In contrast to these accounts, exclusively based on his art work, this paper examines his activities in the field of interior design during the 1990s, which received little analytic attention but occupied a centrality in his cultural practices at the time. By reading closely his interior designs and photo-texts on the urban environments published in interior design magazines, this paper offers new understanding of his obsessive attachment to the urban vernacular as a willful resistance to Seoul's transformation that was intimately related to the reconfiguration of capitalist society as consumer society. I hope to show that his exploration of vernacular images, objects, and architecture was motivated by the desire to grasp the values of endurance, materiality, and spontaneity as alternative to the world of planned obsolescence, sleek superficiality, and passive consumption.