Giving junk a second incarnation

For junk artist Ma Chi-wing, the streets of New York City were littered with potential. Under cover of darkness, he would slip out to harvest the plentiful and free resources of the concrete jungle, his only rivals like-minded artistic scavengers.

'I discovered a dumpster near my studio which for some reason was full of bamboo. You can find a lot of useful materials, such as wood, copper, paper, cardboard on the streets.

'Many of my classmates also looked in the dumpsters - everything is so expensive in New York, so we did it to save money.' For Ma, a student striving for his Fine Arts MA at the School of Visual Arts, the discovery was a godsend and a source of inspiration. It was in New York rather than in his native Sai Kung village of Tai Wu Kok, or in the bamboo scaffolding-filled streets of Hong Kong that he began to experiment with the material.

His installation at the Fringe's Agfa Gallery, the simply titled Bamboo, is the culmination of that experimentation. Exhibited at the Hong Kong Museum of Art at last year's Biennial, this is its second showing in Hong Kong.

Although he started to work with bamboo in New York, Ma's interest in junk and his artistic skills were honed in Hong Kong. The 33-year-old artist describes the junk art he learned from his parents - his father an adroit carpenter, his mother a painter in a local boatyard - of turning discarded wood and other items into useful objects such as bookshelves or stools. Ma says he still enjoys giving unwanted items a second incarnation as furniture.

In this recycling of materials, the environmental message is unavoidable. His attraction to rubbish is partnered by revulsion at the scale of the problem: 'It is unbelievable that [we] dump so much trash every day. Our fragile environment is vulnerable to the crass dumping of resources,' he wrote in his MA thesis.