Chris Jordan + Jurgen Lehl

Chris Jordan + Jurgen Lehl

Kondaya Genbei

This event has ended.

While one man photographs the plastic-filled carcasses of baby seabirds, another creates beautiful lamps from plastic he finds on the beaches of a remote Japanese island. Located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Midway Atoll is 3,200 km from the nearest continent. Yet each year it is engulfed by 20 tons of trash, much of it plastic. PET-bottle caps sprout from the corpses of albatross chicks which were mistakenly fed to them by their parents. Chris Jordan takes photographs to draw attention to this pitiful scene. It is not just the fact that plastic waste is killing these seabirds, but symbolic of the state of modern civilization itself.
Designer Jurgen Lehl (1944–2014) spent over 40 years in Japan. The exhibition will include an installation of lamps he fabricated with messages from plastic he found on the beach. Lehl was a pioneer in environmental awareness. In the latter half of the1990s, he began creating gardens on Okinawa’s Ishigaki Island, where he spent a third of each year at his waterfront home. Walking the beach, he began to take more interest in the plastic garbage that washed ashore than in shells and coral he found. From these bits of plastic he made lamps. Creating beauty and utility from ugliness, Lehl regarded these lamps as a rebellion against his usual creative impulses.

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