'New Era' is comprised of air-blown plastic bags tied to a string and suspended from the ceiling. A deceptively simple sculpture made from the now ubiquitous plastic bag that was actually only beginning to enter the everyday lives of Singaporeans from the 1980s. By the turn of the millennium, the plastic bag has become embedded in our lifestyle with supermarkets providing free plastic bags for groceries that customers have come to expect. Employing plastic bags that are filled with only air - a free but invisible material – effectively changed its function as a relatively cheap container of things, especially commodities that like air, is often provided for free to consumers, and hence taken for granted into a sculptural work that has no utility except for an aesthetic one. Resembling an organic plant now with expanded plastic bags like hanging fruits, 'New Era' plays on tensions between the artificiality of a manufactured product like the plastic bag and the organic form of the hanging sculpture that now threatens our natural environment.
