Yesterday’s Air by Afa Shen

Afa Shen’s practice explores how invisible forces — time, loss, and human impact — can be made perceptible through simple gestures and familiar materials. Working with installation and participatory systems, the artist creates situations where abstract conditions are translated into embodied experiences.​

Yesterday’s Air develops this approach through a deceptively simple structure. Sealed aluminum-foil plastic bags, each containing air collected on a specific date, are presented within a vending machine or modular display. Organized in reverse chronology, the work makes time tangible, suggesting that the present moment holds the freshest air we will ever encounter, while everything else recedes into the past.​

The installation unfolds through a minimal yet deliberate action. Visitors select a bag, tear it open, and inhale. The brief release of air, the sound of rupture, and the empty bag that remains transform this gesture into a quiet ritual of disappearance, where what is experienced cannot be retained.​

Sustainability is embedded both conceptually and materially. The use of petroleum-based, non-degradable plastic reflects the industrial systems that have altered the atmosphere, while the act of collecting and archiving air highlights the fragility of what is often taken for granted. By drawing from natural, industrial, and reconstructed atmospheres, the work forms a layered, evolving archive that traces human impact across time.

Through this multisensory and participatory encounter, Yesterday’s Air translates ecological change into a bodily experience, where progress is measured not only by advancement, but by what is gradually slipping away.