In artist Tseng Yen-ting’s (曾彥婷) video Plastic Bowl, a cheery singer narrates a whimsical yet harrowing first-person life story of a plastic bowl: it takes 180 million years for a dead organism to fossilize and become natural gas or oil, 22 days to ship it to a factory, 96 hours to turn it into a disposable bowl, which is used for a mere 16 minutes at a temple banquet.
But that’s not the end.
The bowl breaks down into microplastics that remain in the ocean for thousands of years, and the tiny shards of plastic then watches as humanity leaves for outer space after presumably ruining Earth. The entire process is playfully animated using various found objects.
Photo courtesy of Tseng Yen-ting
“Everybody dies and I’m still on earth! Everybody leaves and I’m still on earth!” sings artist and songwriter Chiang Tao (蔣韜), who has been working with Tseng on petrochemical and plastic pollution-related projects in Taiwan since 2020 through Uncertain Studio (測不準工作室), which they co-founded.
The video shows one of four physical installations that make up Tseng’s latest project, The Collection of Time in the Polymer Age (在聚合世代採集時間), which explores the subjectivity of the scale of time through different topics related to Taiwan’s petrochemical industry.
Tseng became interested in this approach after reading Susan Freinkel’s Plastic: A Toxic Love Story and noticing how plastics have transformed humanity despite only being with us for a fraction of our existence.
Photo courtesy of Tseng Yen-ting
The Collection of Time in the Polymer Age is one of three projects featured by the newly-formed Magnify Art Collective, which invites creators from around the globe to highlight various social and environmental issues and contribute to the creation of new structures and solutions. The current focus is on plastic pollution, and as one of the world’s top petrochemical producers, Taiwan is an important country to focus on.
The project also promotes existing solutions such as zero-packaging stores and delivery giant Food Panda’s reusable container venture and looks at how government policy can be changed.
ART FOR CHANGE
Photo courtesy of Tseng Yen-ting
Specializing in object theater, Tseng says her earlier work was more poetic and focused less on social issues.
“Through performances, I became sensitive to different found objects and materials,” she says.
But after several residencies abroad, she began to explore the development of these materials in human history and how people generally choose to use them.
Photo courtesy of Tseng Yen-ting
“Can there be other choices? Can we choose different ways to live?” she wondered. “Our society no longer has to be one where we take natural resources — timber, camphor, deer hides — and create an industry from it. There are many decisions that lead to the creation of an industry, it’s not a given that it has to be this way.”
She read a lot on the plastic and petrochemical problem, but most of it was focused on the West, prompting her to do more research on the situation in Taiwan.
“I wanted to know how the plastic industry developed in Taiwan and how we became a major exporter of petrochemical products,” she says.
Uncertain Studio’s first project was the board game City of PVC Smokestacks (PVC煙囪之城), which takes players through important events and landmarks in the history of the industry.
Tseng was put in touch with Magnify, which is supported by the Cosmic Foundation, through the academics and activists she met promoting the game, and decided to create a completely new project that could reach more people.
PETROCHEMICAL STORIES
The concept of time was something that kept coming up for Tseng when doing research on the industry. She was astonished by the time it took for fossil fuels to be created versus the time it took to build up a massive single-use plastics industry.
When the Fifth Naphtha Cracker plant announced in 1990 that it would close in 25 years, it seemed like a short time by industry standards, but that’s enough time for an affected resident to see their child grow up and finish grad school.
“The weight of time is completely different, and we wanted to use this as a point of discussion,” Tseng says.
The other videos feature an anthropomorphized Kaohsiung Refinery built from Lego blocks that sighs wistfully, “Like a giant I always accidentally crush those around [me];” an old lady living near a factory who laments the loss of the muntjac deer; and Foreman Lin, whose wax figure melts as his son sings about his hard life that ends in tragedy.
Looking ahead, the Magnify collective will keep adding related projects to it’s roster, while Tseng plans on doing performances at the heavily polluted Dalinpu Community (大林蒲) in Kaohsiung, whose decades-long relocation struggle continues today.
The videos can be viewed at: magnify.art/asia/time.
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