ARTIST'S STATEMENT: As we enter the halls of wonder that are called the marine museums today, a captivating array of rare sea creatures with vibrant hues and graceful forms gives a feast to the senses, but unfortunately, the present pleasure veils us from the poignant and ironic truth, that of the dark reality looming ahead, threatening to rob future generations of the elegance that is the subject of the admiration. What humankind hardly ever realizes is that the currently ongoing exploitation spells the doom of these species, reducing them to skeletons that serve as a chilling reminder of the era gone by. The magnificence that we fervently admire today may soon become the subject of memory, lost to imagination forever. Let, us therefore, be mindful of the path we tread and the legacy we leave behind, a dynamic array of vibrance for future generations.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Humans would be the ones getting extinct at the end of the sixth extinction. I portrayed the extinct animals, an endangered dolphin, and a person lining up in a film tape as a warning that it will eventually be our turn to be extinct, like a scene in a filmstrip that would inevitably be played in chronological order. Unlike the five previous mass extinctions that occurred due to environmental pressures, “the sixth extinction” is driven by human activities like oil spills, ocean trash, and net entanglements. Vaquita is on the verge of extinction—only ten left—due to illegal fishing and entanglement in gillnets. Moreover, less than 10,000 Kemp’s Ridley Turtles are left due to pollution, overfishing, and humans’ use of artificial light. Furthermore, only 1570 Hawaiian Monk Seals are left due to net entanglements. Finally, tombstones symbolize the deaths of humans following the destruction of marine ecosystems.