Canadian photographer and artist Benjamin Von Wong is known for his travel photography and hyper-realistic artistic style. Von Wong has produced multiple art installations and images to raise awareness on single-use plastics and their effect on the environment. This includes his installation in Vietnam early this year Strawpocalypse, which was made from 168,000 used plastic straws.
This time, in Singapore, he is aiming to raise awareness of the widespread waste caused by single-use plastic cups.
Artist Benjamin Von Wong has collaborated with Social Impact Strategist Laura Francois, Fabricator Josh Goh, and almost 100 volunteers to create his newest project called Plastikophobia designed to raise awareness of single-use plastic cups in Singapore.
Von Wong set out to locate roughly 18,000 plastic cups from various markets and hawker centres throughout Singapore. This only took him about a day and a half, which is testament enough to just how much single-use waste is being produced in the area.
Once these cups were collected, volunteers helped with cleaning the cups and assembling them into a massive cave-like structure that is as confronting as it is beautiful.
Although not technically a word, ‘Plastikophobia’, to Benjamin and his team, represents how they “felt about single-use plastics, especially after spending over two 14-hour days cleaning the small mountain of dirty plastic cups that we had collected with the help of a small army of volunteers.”
The aim of the exhibition was to raise awareness about single-use plastics and hopefully “spread this feeling of Plastikophobia and start by saving our world one cup at a time”. Check out the making of the exhibition below.
