The University of Manitoba campuses are located on original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Ojibwe-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. More
Artist Name: Wei Sun
Title: Leisure time in the post-Anthropocene
Medium: Plastic, found materials, digital photography
Year: 2020
Artist Statement:
When everything on the Earth has been shaped by human activities in the post-Anthropocene, it will be a typical scene in daily life — a happy plastic-man, who is a synthetic creature consisting of plastic and microchips, walking his/her plastic-dog at sunset…
The fast technologies create everything in the world and plastic is our main “natural” material. People rely on this material so much but we don’t know what the long-term impact of the indispensable material is until it ends up within an unnatural community. This bleak outlook is rendered by the assembly of waste plastic parts, I was inspired by during the readings in the course. As Gene Ray says, “With the awareness of living in a damaged world, art can no longer rely on the representation or imagination of a world "out there," of nature as the object of aesthetic reflection.” An artwork in the new epoch could be a horror of alienation.