[Plastic Nature]
As one of the most untapped natural habitats of Hong Kong, Shalowan is also a stone throw away from the Hong Kong International Airport, the quintessential representation of urbanity at its core. This contrast between nature and the manmade represents the typical clash of this dichotomy, facilitating the inevitable flow from nature to urbanity through a slow process. In the heart of this is the plasticization of our nature, of which our oceans among other things are discarded with plastic wastes in an ever-alarming rate every minute. Plastic wastes in our waters are almost ‘mental’, we don’t see them as much as we could sense them. They disintegrate into microplastics in a dimension almost invisible to the naked eyes, affecting the growth of newborn fish and in turn the whole ecological cycle. Our proposed installation attempts to bring this process 100 or even 1000 times the size in front of our very eyes. A small creek in Shalowan with a great vantage point is selected, above which a big piece of plastic is placed to show the disintegration along the flow of the stream. The perfectly shaped beginning, as in all our plastic products, is seen gradually turning into microplastics while it travels downstream and deposited into our mother nature all over the place. Upon which Plastic and Nature are inseparable and left us ponder.