Reusable Universes

Artist Shih Chieh Huang really takes on the saying of one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, producing some incredible cybernetic structures and sculptures.  These sculptures utilize various pieces of plastics, fans, electronics, and circuit building that mimic organic life of deep sea organism.  The plastic deep sea animals glow with brilliant lighting, pneumatics, and colored liquids, and with their tentacles and bodies inflating and deflating, look as though they are swimming through the dark room they are set up in.

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Huang’s interest in the symbiosis of technology and living beings is very prominent through this installation, establishing the feeling of how prominent the implementation of technology and its aid in our everyday lives.  Moreover, this sculpture also suggests an importance and focus on repurposing materials that have been seen as pollutants; especially the plastics that are found scattered throughout our oceans that continuously endanger the lives of the sea creatures he sculpted.

Huang-T-24-L-2017-detail-03.jpg Furthermore, this gives a subtle critique on industry and production in the sense of the waste that is created from our world of industry, however, even though the byproducts of production are inevitable, we as the creators should take it into our hands to keep the world around us clean and even adapt them for other uses in our lives.  Huang’s art is a great display of how the world is adapting to the new advances in the technological world and how organic life can coexist amongst the mechanized world.