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Artist Name: Jennie Lau
Title: Neo-Bamboo Forest
Medium: Digital collage and drawing, Photoshop, photo images, cell phone
Size/Dimension: 3600 (H) x 4800 (W) pixels
Year: 2020
Artist Statement:
Bamboo chopsticks are closely associated with daily life around the globe. They are a very popular dining tool, convenient and disposable. We think they are eco-friendly and recyclable, but they are not — they go to the landfill, and make a significant impact on our environment.
Neo-Bamboo Forest is a digital artwork that cycles disposable bamboo chopsticks through their original landscape of a fast-growing forest to the newly manmade landscape of the Anthropocene — a landfill. My intent with this piece is to alert people of the consequences for our environment whenever we dispose of a single pair. Can we better utilize chopsticks, reduce their disposal rate, and change our lifestyle? The digital process of integrating bamboo chopsticks into the bamboo forest emphasizes human intervention with nature. My process of adding multi-layers of paper echoes our disposal practice and constant damage to our precious land. For me, the digital drawing effect conveys one of the many vicissitudes of the Anthropocene.