A Wave of Plastic
I MET BENJAMIN VON WONG on a beach in Bermuda. We were both there for the Ocean Plastics Leadership Summit, an unlikely convocation of artists, writers, nonprofit leaders, and business executives from some of the world’s largest and most polluting corporations, intended to break down silos and trigger some creative thinking about addressing the ocean plastics crisis. I arrived a day early and put out some feelers, and learned that Von Wong, as he goes by professionally, was creating an installation of beach art as a kind of conversation piece for the summit. He asked if I wanted to volunteer on the installation. Of course I did.
When I arrived, I met a quick-talking young guy dressed in black M. C. Hammer–style pants who seemed to have wandered straight out of the near future. Von Wong had already deputized a collection of local kids and environmental educators who were hard at work gathering seaweed and beach plastic into a massive gyre that could only be appreciated from the sky with the help of Von Wong’s drone. We worked all day, and by the time the sun set, I had many new Bermuda friends and a visceral feeling of purpose for stopping any more plastic from fouling our oceans and beaches. The next day, dozens of executives from organizations such as Dow, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Clorox joined us and went through the same initiation. By the time the actual summit started, we were all galvanized, and people reached across lines in a way that had never happened before, leading to the creation of the Ocean Plastics Leadership Network, a forum for frank exchanges that may be our best hope for breaking the ocean plastics logjam.
Von Wong’s art played a huge role in that, which intrigued me, because in no way did it resemble what I thought of as environmental art. His images were futuristic, slick, and profoundly unnatural — one part , one part manga — even when they touched on themes like pollution, e-waste, and ocean plastic. People were tied to shipwrecks underwater, toxic monsters emerged from washing machines, and mermaids were drowning in seas of plastic bottles. They were weirdly beautiful. And corporations like Starbucks, Nike, and Dell were footing the bill.
