Yesterday , I attended the launch of an art exhibition that featured 8 artists who take the matter of recycling very seriously. It is jointly organised by Pavillion KL , The Star Newspaper and Balai Seni Negara. KL city malls have taken up the recycling issue with gusto this year in various manners, some by issuing alternative material shopping bags, others by organising art exhibitions related to the subject matter , starting with Starhill and now Pavillion KL; this is also in line with efforts seen around the region like in Bangkok and Singapore.

According to Pavillion’s General Manager of Marketing, Miss Kung Suan Ai, the mall culture is very much alive and where best to start looking at recycling since people do a lot of buying and selling from the mall. It is also Pavillion’s way of giving a platform for the artists to showcase their talents.

To cut to the chase (conserve electricity), I chit-chatted with a few artists present as to how they come about doing their art pieces and how they embody recycling in their daily lives.

Lisa Foo and Su Sim- architect and landscape designer (check out their website)- with their artworks recycled plastic bottles installation. This two petite lasses have been collecting and producing functional art pieces using plastic drinking bottles since end of last year. This time around their collaboration comes under the theme of “Sea Creature and Organic Forms” .

Both create artpieces that are tranformational light installations for home or offices. These artworks are painstakingly cut with scissors and stapled together , glued or tied together with “regular domestic skills and utensils” . The whole idea according isn’t just to show how these bottles that are everywhere can be recycled but in the interest of sustainability in terms of recycling, how easily it can be done with just simple household utensils. It is also to encourage lay people to reproduce similar works at home with their own collection of bottles. The whole intention for their works is really to take a first step in showing people how recycling can be done through art .Together through blisters and handiplastered fingers these two ladies cut up almost 15,000 pieces of plastic bottles between them to make their point about recycling. Every piece was lovingly cut and installed at each girls living room which is also in line with their theme on regular domestic application.The result is luminous and surrealistic lighting pieces.

Suzila Zain‘s art and installations were entitled “The Playground”, “Catch of The Day” and “Wheel of Fortune of Fortune”. According to Zila who is a full time naive art artist and glass painter. She uses non toxic paint for all her works. All her mediums were items that were salvaged from her mother’s backyard , her sisters throwaways like the rocking chair toy and her own garbage cans. The idea for “The Playground” was that if we don’t recycle then the children’s play area will grow smaller and smaller , eventually taken over by the garbage as depicted by the empty can drink bottles and teh cramped space for a child on rocking chair complete with stains and all. “Wheel of Fortune” was made with crushed cans and burnt polysterene plastic bags, Her point, even when burnt, poly bags do not melt , so it will still be there in about thousand years. So the only recourse, stop using them or recycle and “… treat trash like treasure which we can use to send message to the world about what’s happening in the world…”.

Tan See Ling – a part time art teacher and full time artist, works part time to finance her full time passion. Her works are really cute she just wraps things up borrowing the idea from the Egyptian mummies where they are wrapped up and preserved. She then fashioned them into rabbits from old newspapers and cloths for her “Many Knots”, “Three Blind Mice” from black garbage bags and then there are her “Seven Dolls” which represent the seven ways of recycling. Her theme is to make use whatever waste at home and that recycling must start from the family and the young ones, which is what the rabbits around the rabbit patch represent. A group a, a community , a family working hard and to untie many knots to get to the carrots. “Three Blind Mice” is about how rodents are often seen as dirty but really they just survive because of the rubbish generated. Her seven dolls each represent the seven ways to environmental preservation; recycle, reduce, reuse, rethink,restore, reverse and repair. When hung on the wall , they represent community strength where if everyone does one bit , together they can protect the environment.

Mahathir Masri- is an indie curator and grafitti artist. His work, one big fish from the river of junk collected since early this year and when fellow artists heard about his efforts to collect these items; they started sending him their own “trash”. His “fish” is a mark of protest against the environmental pollution in the rivers because a river without fish isn’t a river. His passion , beautifying Sg Gombak where the history of Kuala Lumpur begins. In that effort he and a team of fellow graffiti artists actually drew 10km length of grafitti along the banks of Sg Gombak in an effort to send an environmental message about the need to preserve the river and its riverbank. But like all true graffiti artists , who have had to operate on a “hit and run basis” he saw his works painted over by the municipal council on the grounds of vandalism after three days and he still grimaced with pain at the memory. Nonetheless, he recognises the need to continue his work because grafitti is a story about the way of life and it gives soul to the city. So look out Kuala Lumpur next time a graffiti mural appears somewhere, stop for a moment and read the message it is trying to tell…because it could be gone in a blink of an eye, just like the earth if we don’t preserve it.

Tan Kui Hoon‘s- umbrellas , serves as reminder to all that we are always replacing our umbrellas, so she decided to make something pretty and decorative from all the umbrellas that are spoilt and broken and discarded.

I also like Khairul Azmi Shoib‘s works as, he turned trash into fairy tale puppets, imagine a character from Hans Christian Anderson’s stories and he entitled them “We Suck Young Bood” for instance.

There was also Nuriman Amri‘s works which were made from discarded wood , steel beams and wires and transformed into mirrors, aptly entitled “Mirror, Mirror On the Wall” to serve as a reminder of how each one’s actions is a mirror for their recycling efforts, perhaps.

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