Alice Newstead has taken her protest against shark fishing to Hong Kong, again backed by Lush, the British cosmetics company. Instead of hanging in a store window as she did in Paris, Alice is hanging in an arts centre courtyard for 20 minutes at a time.

Her purpose is to protest the killing of 73 million sharks a year, threatening their extinction. The killing of the sharks is particularly inhumane. Their fins are sliced off to make the soup and they are thrown alive back into the water, unable to swim and sentenced to death.

Because Hong Kong serves as a key trend setting city among Asian communities, it’s only the people of Hong Kong who can lead the way to stopping this brutal luxury consumer practice of using shark fin soup as a display of wealth. Currently the fins are worth about $300 a pound.

Original Story December 2009

When Dave Head sent me this photo of Alice Newstead hanging by fish hooks in a Parisian shop window, I was amazed by her creativity. In some photos Alice looks amazingly mermaid-like. Being a fashion director and former fabric-development expert, I marvelled that her fish-skin fabric didn’t tear.

British performance artist Alice Newstead, suspended from then ceiling with hooks through the skin on her back hangs in the window of a cosmetic shop in Paris, Thursday, July 2, 2009 while talking with Paul Watson, right, head and founder of the conservation group Sea Shepherd. It never occurred to me that Alice Newstead was hanging in a Lush cosmetics shop window with shark-hooks piercing her own skin. I remain horrified by her performance art concept, in which Newstead creates her own religious rite, an ashura-like drama on behalf of sharks.