TYLER TIANWEI Cao


WE ARE by Cai Guo-Qiang
City Moss
The True Cost
Shanghai Film Company
Five Star Sports
Sisyphus Boulder
Drawings
Various Artworks

The True Cost


Personal projectJuly–September 2022
Sculpture, installation
Mixed media

This sculpture was informed by the negative impacts of fast fashion on people and the environment, particularly the Rana Plaza building collapse in 2013 in which over a thousand garment workers lost their lives. In addition to the human cost, which beyond deaths include injury and illness such as cancer, fast fashion brings serious harms to the environment such as by polluting water sources with bleaches and dyes.

The sculpture uses real discarded factory-made garments from and upcycles the materials into resin-encased bricks to form an art piece. The harsh and dense rectilinear bricks, stacked in heavy formations, give a stronger physical presence to the garment materials, prompting the viewer to consider the impact and cost of the fast fashion industry and even evoking the indsutry’s physical presence at sites such as Rana Plaza.
This piece was informed in part by the Rana Plaza building collapse in 2013, in which over a thousand garment workers lost their lives.
Concept sketch of the sculpture and process photos from cutting down the resin-encased garment bricks.
Discarded garments are upcycled by forming their materials into resin-encased bricks, stacked in construction-like formation.
The dense bricks and formation give a stronger physical presence to the garments, asking the viewer to consider their source and impact.
The bricks also evokes the fast fashion industry’s physical presence at sites such as Rana Plaza.
A detail of the bricks produced using the discarded garment materials.
Accompanying the brick sculpture are fictionalized garment tags describing the carelessness of fast fashion producers and consumers.

All projects


2025 Tyler Tianwei Cao
ttwcao.com
twcao15@gmail.com
+1 201 788 8891