12 Art Installations That I Made To Highlight The Environmental Crisis We Are Facing

As human beings, we go through so much junk. Every day, we make dozens of small decisions to buy more stuff – at the supermarket, malls, online… For most of my life, I didn’t think it mattered. After all, I was just one tiny speck on Earth, making a couple of small decisions.

But one day, I found myself in a landfill surrounded by endless mountains of everyone’s ‘small decisions’ and realized that maybe those small decisions added up after all.

Since then, I have been gathering volunteers, artists, non-profits, and companies to come together and create art installations that help to bridge the gap between statistics and emotions.

Each and every piece has an educational video that goes with it and I truly hope that one of them will touch your heart!

More info: Instagram | youtube.com | vonwong.com

‘The Parting of the Plastic Sea’ was made from 168,000 plastic straws collected over 6 months

With my latest piece, I wanted to find a unique way to showcase the threat our oceans and future generations are under. It took us 6 months to collect 168,000 straws recovered off the streets of Vietnam.

Every single piece of plastic ever made still exists on the planet today in one form or another. How terrifying to think that all those little purchase decisions we make add up to so much over one lifetime? ‘The parting of the plastic sea’ hopes to bring focus on one tiny part of the problem: straws.

By the year 2050, there could be more plastic than fish in the sea. Which sounds crazy! But when you look at the combination of overfishing, which is currently depleting more and more species of sea creatures and threatens the stability of the world’s oceans, and combine that with the problematic production of plastics… That’s when you start to realize how bad the situation is.

This is how the art installation was created

This mermaid is lying on 10,000 plastic bottles – the number of bottles the average American uses over the course of their life

This is how it was created

These ‘Toxic Laundry’ monsters represent the microplastic fibers released every time we wash our sports clothes

This is how I made the ‘Toxic Laundry’ art installation

This waterfall is made from thousands of used shirts highlighting the 2500 liters of water it takes to make a single cotton t-shirt

The fashion industry is one of the largest polluters on our planet. That tornado you see? Well, it was made entirely out of clothing scraps left behind by the clothing factory that went bankrupt 10 years ago.

This is how I created it

This cave is made from 18,000 plastic cups, collected from foodcourts in just one and a half days with the help of volunteers

What if every one of us could become a little bit more ‘plasticophobic’? With less than 10% of plastics recycled every single year, we’re starting to run out of time to save our oceans.

This is how it was created

This vortex is made from hundreds of used computers to show how past technologies can be recycled to power future devices

This is how it was created

This closet fits one lifetime of clothing

It’s so hard to explain numbers sometimes until you get the chance to experience the scale of it. With the Tallest Closet In The World, we wanted people to have a sense of empowerment to believe in their own ability to affect the size of their own closet. Clothing has a massive environmental footprint and is something that we can individually control.

This is how it was created

Series showing individual action isn’t enough to solve the plastic problem

Recycling is great, but what happens to plastic in the smaller, poorer and more remote cities that aren’t set up for it? They’re stuck dealing with first world commodities that were built to last forever with no way of getting rid of it. Every 60 seconds, a truckload of plastic enters the ocean. Statistics are hard to visualize so we decided to show it instead. Let’s get corporations to commit to finding a better alternative to plastics!!

Image credits: vonwong

This is how it was created

Particle accelerator out of keyboards

This is how it was created

A Portal out of Circuit Boards made to create an easy way for people to talk about e-waste recycling

How it’s done:

Did you know that 70M trees are cut down every year to make the clothing that we wear?

What kind of future are we leaving for the next generation? Please, help us turn off the plastic tap

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