“A Day of the Waste: Bing Zi Market” is made from the everyday organic leftover from Tainan’s local wet markets. Ruobing spent time visiting various local markets in Tainan observing how the organic waste was being dealt with. Her artwork “A Day of the Waste: Bing Zi Market” is a contextualisation of her collection of one day of organic waste (12 December 2023) that she could manage to gather from the largest traditional market – Bing Zi market in Tainan. She extracted the fiber from the collected organic waste, and subsequently made it into paper and then bound into a book. The process means to transfer the direct product of the earth from the leftover of human activities into a book – a medium for recording information in the form of writing or drawing. Such a materialised transformation from one form to another is to leverage the book’s intellectual function in introducing us to things and perspectives, and recording history and spreading awareness.
Ultimately, “A Day of the Waste: Bing Zi Market” responds to a moment in time when our food systems are fragile, and there is much to be transformed to achieve healthy living and a healthy planet.
“A Day of the Waste: Bing Zi Market” was produced during the artist’s residency in Tainan supported by Absolute Space for the Arts (Dec 2023).
