Out to Sea? The Plastic Garbage Project

Please be invited to 

Out to Sea? The Plastic Garbage Project

at Hong Kong Science Museum

27th Nov.2015 to 17th Feb.2016

I'm honoured to contribute a Trash-Land-Art installation to the exhibition Out to Sea? The Plastic Garbage Project at the Hong Kong Science Museum. The installation is supported by the ever inspiring HK Youth Arts Foundation and will be displayed from 27.Nov.2015 to 17.Feb.2016. Our installation is called Stains / 污點  and consists of 17 circles of marine litter, each in a different colour. 

The concept for Out to Sea? The Plastic Garbage Project brings together science and art and originates from the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich. Their exhibition gathers complex facts of plastics and its environmental consequences in an easily understandable way. Art as an intermediator to make scientific facts more juicy and interesting - what an inpiring way to learn! So lots of great reasons for you to visit the HK Science Museum again. 

Hope to see you there!

眼前所見的作品是利用南大嶼山籮箕灣海灘上的廢棄物製作而成。40名來自香港航海學校及圓玄學院妙法寺內明陳呂重德紀念中學的學生在一個白天的時間，已經收集了共28袋的80公升海灘廢棄物，而它們主要來自中國內地及香港本地。環保藝術家liina klauss自2011年開始創作「垃圾山水」系列作品，所有作品只會按照廢棄物的原有顏色、形狀及大小分類，而「污點」是其中一組作品。藝術家希望藉着環境藝術裝置，讓大眾提升減廢的意識。這系列作品不但改變人們對藝術的印象，亦讓人反思人類的消費模式，從而傳達環境保護的信息，並實踐liina所想：「是廢亦是寶，你的看法可改變一切」。

more info on HK Science Musuem here
more info on Plastic Garbage Project here
more pictures of 污點 / Stains here

* on the above photos you see art-awareness-activists from Hong Kong Sea School and The Yuen Yuen Institute MFBM Nei Ming Chan Lui Chung Tak Memorial College helping to create 'Stains'. I would like to thank them for their hard work and passion to change the world with their own two hands!

in-spired

the hongkong air is extremely polluted the past couple of days. my daughter has developed a slight form of asthma because of it. it makes me cry.
i see, smell, touch, taste, hear and feel the world around me. 

i am not happy for my children, for myself or for anyone, to breath in polluted air, to swim in an ocean of plastic, to walk on concreted soil. i am not happy to see the earth filled up with indigestible waste. i am not happy to feed my children toxic food. i am not happy to be part of the destruction. 

yet it is our choice. we made the choice to live this way.

we gave velocity & mobility priority over slowness and quiet. convenience over simplicity. cleanliness over soil and sweat. safety over adventure. concepts over spontaneity. 

we planed, designed, calculated, manufactured and created this future we're living in now.

it is still our choice, every single moment we have the choice.
a pilot friend of mine told me in his 15-years career he's seen beijing for the first time from above. literally. seen the city. for once there was no smog. the reason was 'golden week', a nation wide holiday when all factories are shut down for a continuous period of 7 days.
the change is always here and now! in fact it can only be here and now.

walk barefoot. drink from a mountain stream. eat fresh fruits from a tree. let nature feed you. close your eyes and look into the sun. see the colours. smell the grass. feel the wind.

blaming others is not the answer. blaming yourself is not the answer. both are destructive and wasting creative energy. 
i don't want to make a grouchy face like in this photo anymore !

we are capable of so much more.

we are and only we can be the solution.

anytime. 

any place. 

any person. 

all change starts within.

ocean hero

Ecozine summer edition 2015

within two hours we find 246 shoes. a friend of mine and me are on a beautiful beach in south lantau. we're by ourselves except a fisherman on a rock in the far distance. the beach is filled with white sand and embraced by big bleached boulders on both sides. the water is clear and soft waves fill the air with a calming swoosh. a black kite is soaring high above us. on the horizon small islands are in a misty blur. for thousands of years chinese artists have captured this serenity of nature on paper. these ink scrolls are called 山水. literally 山 means mountain and 水 means water, translated as 'landscape'. for thousands of years this landscape has not changed. but starting 50 years ago a third element, man-made,  has entered the picture: plastic. our civilization will be remembered by this element, because it lasts hundreds maybe thousands of years. we do not know the exact durability because we are in this experiment for the first time ever. 
500 years ago leonardo da vinci drew a picture called 'le proporzioni del corpo umano secondo vitruvio'. it depicts a beautiful man in a circle with his arms and legs stretched out and free. it is the artist's observation of the proportions of the human body and the translation of those natural measurements into architecture. nature was the artist's paradigm for the creation of beauty. today we still possess this tremendous creative power. the centre of the circle is the human navel: all comes from within us, imagined by the human mind, materialized by human hands. yet today we cannot move freely anymore. lying in this circle of marine litter i feel like lying in a body cast. we have created an avalanche of material beauty that has gotten out of hands. we have created a reality in which we cannot swim in the sea anymore, because it is full of trash. we cannot eat fish anymore because it is contaminated. we cannot appreciate the horizon anymore because it is blurred by smog. we believe that we need 'things' to make life easier, more comfortable, essentially happier. and this surely is true to some extend, but today we have lost the sense of proportion! do we really need 20 pairs of shoes in our closet? do we really need bottled water from the other end of the globe for lunch? rather than working to earn the money to buy another pair of shoes, would it not be wonderful to spend that time walking barefoot on a beautiful beach? rather than drinking sterilized water from a plastic bottle would it not be wholesome to drink cool fresh water from a mountain stream? 
the relation of man and nature is what da vinci captured ingeniously in his drawing 500 years ago. this relationship has never changed. we are still striving for a balanced and harmonious life. for me personally nature is the answer. all of what we are looking for is already here. it is just outside of our civilized reality, waiting for us to arrive. now.

this portrait is called 'out of proportion' and is part of the series 'trash-land-art / 垃圾山水'.