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A recent exhibition of artworks based on garbage attempted to educate people on how wasteful consumption is destroying the planet.
Garbage has negative associations such as dirt, stink, germs, corruption and something useless. However, a recent art exhibition based on garbage only, proved that useless thing is actually of practical significance.
The show Dear Pretty Rubbish, recently organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature and digital media art company Blackbow in Beijing, focused on wasteful consumption and re-examined the relationship between people's lifestyle and garbage, as well as the environmental problems caused by it, according to organizers.
One of the goals of the art exhibition is to educate more young Chinese about the problem of plastics, a hot topic globally. [Photo provided to China Daily]
We hope that everyone (who visited the show) can think about how the 'useless things' are generated, why they are exiled, and whether 'useless things' are really useless, says Cao Yujia, the design director of Blackbow, and also one of the curators.
The organizers say all the raw materials for the exhibition came from the rubbish, plastic waste and garbage the artists collected in communities.
One of the exhibits, No Plastic in Nature, is an installation showing a tuna swimming in the ocean with a plastic bottle in its stomach. It was made using 15,000 discarded plastic bottle caps collected from around the country, as part of a project carried out by WWF and LxU, a Beijing-based content marketing and design company, in June.
Speaking about the project, Liu Hui, a senior brand manager with LxU, says: At first, we were worried whether we could collect enough caps to produce the installation. But it turns out that our concern was misplaced.
In 10 days, packages filled with plastic bottle caps were flown into the WWF office, sent by volunteers from schools, companies, communities and by individuals. Sometimes the sender would add a letter or photo to tell how the caps were collected.
Among the contributors were teenagers in school uniforms picking up rubbish on the beach, a student saying he picked up bottle caps at physical education classes where such garbage was often discarded carelessly, and another student saying: My dream is to protect the planet from destruction.
Artists then cleaned the caps, sorted them out by color and stuck them on a white board. The use of color was to symbolize the struggling creatures with microplastics in them, a problem few people recognize, says Liu.
Researchers define microplastics as plastic pieces whose diameters are smaller than 5 millimeters. The work aims to teach the public about the problem of microplastics, raise awareness of plastic waste pollution and call for further action, Liu says, adding that the handmade artwork was used in public service posters in subways and airports in Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Xi'an.
At the exhibition, children put plastic bottles into a machine, from which 3D-printing animal figures would drop out. The figures show the bodies of lobsters, sea lions, turtles and fish trapped in plastic items such as bags, gloves and bottles.
There are also photography works showing a bird's-eye view of garbage along the seaside and videos that compare the rapid production of plastics with the slow degradation of it.
