Comprising bales of cardboard waste, Five Tonnes of Homes and Other Understories is an artifact of the artist’s year-long intervention into the informal micro-economy of the cardboard recycling network in the Central district of Hong Kong. Under the canopy of a vast and globalized industry of cardboard recycling, the artist’s intervention shines light onto the local uniqueness of this particular recycling network. It is shaped and inhabited by the experiences of its human agents, embodying the lived experience flourishing in accidental corners of a ravenous global economy.
The work is part of the artist’s project Trade/Trace/Transit (2014 – 2016), a series of interventions into a close-knit socio-economical network of cardboard stakeholders, comprising multinational groups in the Central district. The artist sees this network as a kind of forested understory – a crucial decomposing layer – in a global industry worth billions of dollars.
由一捆捆舊紙皮組成的作品《Five Tonnes of Homes and Other Understories
，是藝術家經過長達一年的時間，對香港中環紙皮回收這一微型經濟網絡
的觀察成果。回收網絡龐大而全球化，藝術家的介入行為凸顯了其本土
特性。這一網絡是由人塑造出來並使之存在，詮釋著在這貪婪的全球經濟
中，一個意料之外的角落裡孕育著蓬勃的生存體驗。
這件作品是藝術家的《Trade/Trace/Transit （2014 – 2016）項目其中一
部份，針對常活躍於中區的不同國籍人士所組成的拾荒者網絡，進行藝術
介入行為。藝術家將這一嚴密的網絡視為價值數十億元的環球產業下，衍
生出來的「林下葉層」—— 一個關鍵的可分解層面。
