Maria Won is a Toronto-based artist, curator, and a current MFA student at Oxford Brookes University. After achieving her Master’s degree in Art History & Curatorial Practice along with her diploma in Asian Studies in Toronto, Canada, she decided to pursue her practice in Oxford with a keen interest in multidisciplinary, artificial intelligence, performance video, and virtual reality.
People's consciousness, allowing us to grasp and represent the surroundings in which we live, can sometimes obstruct their attempts to comprehend ecosystems, an issue that makes it difficult for us to live sustainably. Won comments on single-use plastic, mass production, and consumerism and its impact on our contemporary society in an ecological framework to contextualize the bicultural experiences and identity of an Asian immigrant. How can we rethink human-ecological systems in the industrialized world?
Her recent work incorporates a fictional utopian/ dystopian universe referencing the capital market system questioning what life would be like without plastic and the hypothetical future of plastic. By having the viewers engage in the space of paradox and dilemma, she hopes the viewers to find empathy towards nature and animals reflecting on the value of humanity and not taking what's given for granted.