They look like one hundred colourful popsicles. Some are strangely beautiful, almost tempting. Look closer, however, and you begin to see plastic, dirt, cigarette butts, oily residue, insects and other waste suspended inside them. This is not simulated pollution. What we see really came from contaminated water in Taiwan.
In 2017, three Visual Communication Design students at the National Taiwan University of Arts — Hung I-chen, Guo Yi-hui and Cheng Yu-ti — turned their graduation project into one of the most striking visual representations of contemporary water pollution. They called it 100% Polluted Water Popsicles (100%純污水製冰所).
Sabino Maria Frassà, 30 August 2026
Guo Yi-hui Cheng Yu-ti, 100%純污水製冰所
The trio collected contaminated water from 100 different locations across Taiwan, including rivers, ports, beaches, canals and drainage systems. Each sample became a different popsicle: one hundred objects forming a disturbing geography of pollution.
The process itself is an essential part of the work. The artists travelled around Taiwan gathering polluted water together with whatever was floating or suspended in it. The samples were frozen into the familiar shape of an ice pop. Since ice could obviously not survive as an exhibition object, the pieces were then recreated at full scale in transparent polyester resin, preserving the debris inside.
The result is a collection of one hundred miniature relics of the Anthropocene.
Yet the artistic power of the project lies not simply in turning dirty water into sculpture. Its real conceptual device is the collision between form and content. A popsicle belongs to a visual universe of childhood, summer, pleasure and colour. It is something designed to be desired and eventually brought to the mouth. Here, that same object contains the very things we have thrown away.
The artists went further, designing individual packaging for the popsicles and giving the project the appearance of a disturbingly convincing commercial product line. The visual language of consumer design promises pleasure while the contents reveal contamination.
This is precisely where 100% Polluted Water Popsicles becomes more than an environmental awareness campaign. The artists do not simply represent pollution. They insert it into the visual codes through which desire itself is produced. Waste becomes product. Repulsion becomes attraction. Something normally hidden beneath the surface of the water is transformed into something we might, for a fraction of a second, actually want to taste.
The project therefore occupies a compelling territory between conceptual art, design, visual communication and pop culture. It does not merely tell us that water is polluted. It makes us experience a contradiction: first we desire the object; only afterwards do we understand what we are looking at.
At the heart of the work lies an almost childishly simple question: If something looks good, does that mean it is good?
In 2017, the project was shown at the Young Designers’ Exhibition at the Taipei World Trade Center and was recognised by the Young Pin Design Award, before attracting widespread international media attention.
Then, five years later, something remarkable happened. In January 2022, one of the polluted-water popsicles appeared on the cover of Vogue Taiwan as part of Heat Wave, a sustainability-focused fashion story photographed by Zhong Lin and featuring model Peng Chang. Vogue Taiwan credits Leslie Sun as Editor in Chief, Zhong Lin as photographer, Joey Lin as Fashion Director and WenChing Yu as Prop Designer, while specifically acknowledging the National Taiwan University of Arts and 100% Polluted Water Popsicles. It was an almost perfect conclusion to the work’s conceptual journey. An artwork created in 2017 to imitate a consumer product had entered Vogue five years later — one of the most powerful cultural machines ever created for producing and circulating desire. In Zhong Lin’s photograph, Peng Chang raises the polluted popsicle towards her mouth. Around her, Heat Waveimagines a damaged environment shaped by waste and by a natural world increasingly altered by human activity.
Fashion does not weaken the artwork’s message. It intensifies its paradox.
The photograph is beautiful.
The model is beautiful.
And, disturbingly, the popsicle is beautiful too.
Except now we know what is inside it.
Perhaps this is the enduring power of 100% Polluted Water Popsicles. The work does not simply ask us to look at pollution. It confronts us with our strange relationship to the things we manufacture, desire, consume and eventually discard. Waste does not disappear simply because we stop looking at it. Sooner or later, it may return. Perhaps disguised as something we desire.
Would you still eat it?
Project: 100% Polluted Water Popsicles / 100%純污水製冰所
Artists: Hung I-chen, Guo Yi-hui and Cheng Yu-ti
Year: 2017
Institution: National Taiwan University of Arts
Instagram: @polluted_water_popsicle
Vogue Taiwan, Heat Wave: January 2022
Photography: Zhong Lin — @zhonglin_
Model: Peng Chang — @cchang_____
Editor in Chief: Leslie Sun — @sunles
Prop Designer: WenChing Yu — @wen__ching__
