an installation for Plasticity Forum in Portugal!

draft for 'circle' 垃圾山水 trash-land-art installation in Cascais, Portugal

200 attendees 48 hours 25 speakers one important conversation: THE FUTURE OF PLASTIC!  Plasticity Forum, organized by Ocean Recovery Alliance is an annual conference held June 8 – 9 in Cascais, Portugal. The forum forms part of a global series of events in Portugal: The Economist’s World Ocean Summit and Portugal’s Blue Week. Building on the success of the previous Plasticity Forums in Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong and New York, this year’s forum will focus on "Designing for Circularity, Customer Engagement, Reverse Supply Chains and Reaching Scale”. 

I'm proud to be making a trash-land-art installation called 'circle' for Plasticity Forum at Cicadela Historic Hotel in Cascais open for visitors from 4.-10.June. Two great marine protection organizations have already started to collect trash/treasure: Associação Portuguesa do Lixo Marinho and Brigada do Mar. Thank you so much for your enthusiasm! And of course we always want to inpire more: If you are in the area and interested to be part of the 'art-awareness-activism' please connect HERE for schedule and event details. The more people, the more art, the more fun, the more awareness!

Here's a short version of the concept: Regarding the questions 'Where does it come from?' and 'Where is away?' the installation 'circle' gives a holistic answer showing the interconnectedness and continuum of all life as well as the implications of our human actions. The installation questions our value system by showing trash as something beautiful and valuable and challenging the viewer in his/her traditional believes: 'Is it still ugly? When did it become beautiful? Is this art or is this trash?' The magic of transforming trash into treasure becomes a visual and sensual experience. The goal of 'circle' to spark curiosity, to offer a different view-point and to trigger dialogue about plastic and marine pollution.

For more details please check my facebook page ... Hope to see you in Portugal:)

two workshops for 'mother earth groove'

I'm happy to invite you to MOTHER EARTH GROOVE this SUNDAY 17th May at CHEUNG SHA BEACH from 2-6pm. I'll be giving two workshops: 'mind-your-head' and 'paints made from scratch - the radical self-reliant artist'. All proceeds will be going to the best charity in HongKong raising awareness, respect and gratitude for the natural world around us: ARCEDEN 

See you all on beautiful Cheung Sha Beach this coming Sunday:)

a new project for microgalleries

I'm proud to be part of MicroGalleries 2015: From 8 – 24 May, in Nowra, Australia with over 40 stunning artists from the Shoalhaven, wider Australia and from around the world!

The title of the work you see above is called 'involuntary pairs'. These photos are my contribution to MicroGalleries in Nowra, Australia this year. I've been collecting these pairs since 2013.  

Every object has been lost at sea and found on a beach in Asia. The matching in pairs follows the principle of sameness meaning the human perception recognizes them as same. Yet their inherent qualities couldn't be more different: while one originates from nature the other one is a product of human imagination and manufacturing. What starts as an innocent visual comparison has fatal consequences for wildlife, humans and nature as a whole. Latest research from 2014 estimates that more than five trillion pieces of plastic weighing 269,000 tons have accumulated in the world oceans. Plastic brakes down to the nano size particles, is eaten by plankton, small fish, bigger fish and humans at the end of the food chain. What you see here is a small excerpt of a huge ecological catastrophe. 

MicroGalleries is going to work with Nowra to prove how a community can re-frame how they view their environment and their cultural offering to the local community and the world, as well as demonstrate that everyone can appreciate and enjoy art if they are provided the opportunity to do so – Nowra is gonna prove our theory.

Pop-up space, symposiums, performance installations, sounds drops, new interdisciplinary work, walls upon walls of pastings and a couple of cheeky pot hole gardens and Nowra will never be the same again! Schedule is here: microgalleries.org/events/nowra-australia-baby/

Sign up for one of seven free tours led by performance artists, join us in the pop-up arts space or just grab a map and meander through town. It’s all free and when you’re done there’s plenty of awesome local coffee, shops and a gazillion Op-Shops to sink your teeth into!

More info here: microgalleries.org/events/nowra-australia-baby/

all colours

i was asked why i'm working with all colours of the spectrum and not just with blue representing water and green representing the mountains. the question came from a hongkong journalism student, understanding the title 垃圾山水. this is the name i've given to the land-art installations meaning trash-mountain-water in the sense of trash-landscape. to the natural elements of mountain=山 and water=水 i'm adding a third element, acutely recent and man-made: trash=垃圾. 
when painting i don't choose my colours, i paint with the colours i find on that particular beach. i paint with that which presents itself to me. you could almost say the colours find me rather than the other way around. and  ALL colours are present in the landscape:  from dark to light, from man-made to organic, from vibrant to dull, from alive to dead. the colour-wheel that i lay out is all-encompassing. there are no good or bad colours! 
i'm very humble in the presence of this all-encompassing concept seeing the smallness of my human judgements constantly criticizing this and that. my heart tells me it is much more than merely a mental concept. every time i'm connected to this all-encompassing energy i'm in awe: nature has no favourites, nature has no prejudices, nature is forever adjusting and nature always all-ways forgives. there is a yearning to learn these qualities, to find them inside myself, to be this. if we are not nature then what are we? do we still perceive ourselves as separate? these qualities are inside of us, too. it is time to go through our own inner rubbish and find those qualities that have been buried for so long. rather than learning this from the head i feel i have to be still enough, sensitive enough to see and acknowledge them inside my very being. they are longing to come out into the light and show their colours! ALL COLOURS!