Sustained

Sustained is a floor installation made from waste produced through coffee consumption. Zhiwei Bai collaborated with multiple coffee shops to collect a large quantity of used coffee grounds within a limited period. Because untreated grounds quickly develop mould, their collection, transportation, drying, and preservation became part of the material process through which the work was produced.

Bai combined the grounds with resin and cast them in moulds to create a group of containers marked by compression, folds, and deformation. Their forms imitate discarded coffee bags, yet each is given the opening and function of a vase. The residue of coffee consumption is thus transformed into an object capable of holding flowers while retaining the appearance of something that has been thrown away.

Loose coffee grounds cover the floor of the installation, across which the dark containers are distributed at varying densities. Some hold living flowers. As the exhibition progresses, the flowers move from bloom toward decay, while the vessels made from coffee grounds and resin remain comparatively stable. The temporary changes of living matter coexist with waste stabilized through an industrial material. “Sustained” therefore describes not only preservation or recycling as a positive promise, but the different rates at which materials persist and change.

The work is connected to Bai’s experience of growing up in Shenzhen. The incorporation of coffee into his daily life coincided with the city’s rapid development into a metropolitan consumer culture. Coffee functions not only as a beverage but as part of changing patterns of work, social space, lifestyle, and imagined identity. Rather than narrating this history through brand imagery, the work begins with the grounds left after consumption, returning a material consequence normally removed from view to the centre of attention.

Sustained does not restore waste to its original state as coffee, nor does it claim that the material has entered a perfectly circular system. Once the grounds are bound in resin, they become another composite whose form and function have changed irreversibly. The work is concerned less with a purified narrative of regeneration than with the movement of matter between use, disposal, preservation, and reformation.

The form of the vessel establishes the work’s central contradiction. It continues to resemble a crushed and abandoned package while regaining the capacity to support flowers. It appears as waste and simultaneously becomes an aesthetic object. Abandonment, function, and beauty do not cancel one another but remain present within the same material body.

Sustained situates residue within consumption, urban life, and material cycles. After collection, drying, binding with resin, and recasting, the coffee grounds do not return to their former use but become a composite with new functions and new material burdens. The work focuses on this irreversible transformation and on how it brings the usually discarded consequences of consumption back into view.