Green Chopsticks

Artists React

There seems to be something about the fact of all those chopsticks being thrown out that excites the artistic impulse.

California artist Donna Keiko Ozawa created sculptures with over 15,000 disposable chopsticks in Japan in Transformation/Possibility: The Waribashi Project, in which she also invited the public to participate in "community artmaking," and interviewed people about their feelings about disposable chopsticks. She has plans to create a similar project in California. It is well worth reading her Supporting Materials.

In an article for Chinese-art.com called "Post-Material: Our Idea and the Pale of Reality," Huang Du writes: "Yang Qing's work documents a lumberman cutting down trees. As they shake, and fall we are reminded of how the daily consumption of endless, disposable chopsticks contributes greatly to the devastation of forests. The interplay of time, space and speed in his work jar the visual senses."

Chopstick "trees:"

As part of the commemoration of World Environment Day, university students in China erected a "huge tree made of disposable chopsticks... to remind people of the importance of conserving trees," reported Liao Liang on CCTV.

Xingua news service reported that "hundreds of people in Chengdu, the capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, visited the city museum to see an unusual "tree" made of 23,000 wooden chopsticks. Standing 1.7 meters tall and weighing 45 kg, the tree was on display to symbolize the flagrant waste of timber in China."

Chinese artist Zhang Lei placed 4,500 Disposable chopsticks in a tree in a work called "Natural Attributes."

For Earth Day 1998, environmentalists in Japan constructed a "The Tree of Life" from waribashi (disposable wooden chopsticks) "as an educational and visual tool to carry its message of personal responsibility across Japan."

In a 1994 installation called "Exotica: Hashi de Mato Grosso," Bruce and Norman Yonemoto projected archival footage of a tribal dance being performed by the Mato Grosso, a tribe in the Brazilian rain forest, onto a row of disposable hashi (chopsticks), examining the idea of the "exotic" as it pertains to the indigenous and the foreign, and "satirizing here a circulating rumor that the rain forest is being destroyed by the Japanese need for wood to make chopsticks." The piece gains another level of irony and strength as the rumor has turned out to be true.

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