For the Art Kiosk, Phaan Howng has created a site-specific, hand painted installation to create a dialogue about climate change in Redwood City. By placing viewers in a future where their surrounding environment is in “post-apocalyptic” conditions, Howng challenges residents with the following questions: Can you adapt to the changing environment and are you able to make the sacrifices in order to do so, or shall we be okay to have human kind secede into extinction?

Howng draws her inspiration from Redwood City’s sign of Climate Best by Government Test, its history as a port for lumber, and the fact that the city is part of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is typically associated with technology and innovation, but for Howng it represents the continuous consumption and mining of raw materials from the earth to drive it.

Using her distinctive “man-made color pallet” of bright and toxic colors, Howng transforms the ART KIOSK into a surrealist forest of hand painted trees physically going through various detoxification, and toxic yet intoxicated transformations–trunks and branches drooping and melting away into oblivion over an abstracted typographic map of Redwood City and its geographic surroundings. The color changing lights signify the passage of time.  On the opening day, viewers can walk through this forest and engage in the post-apocalyptic climate.