When you pull a foil bag of potato chips down from the shelf in the supermarket, you're usually thinking only about its contents. But when that same colorful bag is used as a cover for an art catalog, the disposable wrapping has suddenly turned into an ambiguous, sophisticated artifact.

That's just what Annette Meyer did, at her first exhibitions in Japan, held this summer. The 35-year-old Danish artist exhibited 60 tailor-made suits fashioned from disposable wrapping material at the Kyoto Art Center (in June) and the first-floor Spiral Garden of Tokyo's Spiral building (in July). In a special event to mark the Tokyo opening of the installation, Bodywrapp Inc., 20 Japanese models strode through the streets and subway stations wearing Meyer's garments.

This month, Meyer was summoned back to Tokyo to coordinate an event for the Japanese bimonthly magazine, EAT.

She set up projectors to cast photos of colorful packing into the event space. Guests attended clad in white so they could catch the images on their bodies and "wrap" themselves in packing designs from companies like Nabisco, Kabaya Foods, Fisherman's Friend and Danisco.

With her unusual take on the stuff of everyday life, Meyer has received considerable attention during her Bodywrapp Inc. exhibition tour; one that took in three continents -- Asia, America and Europe. Mixing mass-produced packing material from all over the world, Bodywrapp Inc. clothes also mediate national -- and perhaps international -- identity. Meyer believes that packaging tells us much about cultural differences and global similarities.

After all, packaging and fashion garments deal in a common currency worldwide. Clothes are also a kind of wrapping, making a statement about the person inside. Given that, could the public be persuaded to wear Meyer's smart suit made of potato-chip packaging, which advertises a fat-free content? Or how about a pink, shrimp-snack suit?

If you missed her earlier events, then the good news is that Annette Meyer is on her way back to Japan for a third time in December. Wide Japanese interest in her work has led to her being invited to conduct a one-week workshop in a high school in Ibaraki Prefecture as part of a program of artists-in-residence.

The popularity of Meyer's packaging art in Japan may not be entirely coincidental. The average Japanese consumes one-and-a-half times more disposable packing material than an American and three times more than a Dane. Meyer's past work has reflected this proportion in the number of suits she has made from Japanese wrapping materials.

"I provoke, but my art is not necessarily an ecological statement," says Meyer, who is trained as a professional fashion designer but works mainly as an artist.

She points out that her pieces are not the product of recycling -- all the outfits are made of packaging material that has never been used, received in rolls directly from the manufacturers.

Garments designed by Meyer are handmade by professional tailors in the Baltic state of Letland, where they are finished and lined with blue and pink cotton. The clothes are, therefore, functional and wearable -- and a major Japanese fashion house is interested in producing them commercially.

So if they're not an ecological statement, are Meyer's clothes telling us something about consumerism? The artist agrees that handmade suits crafted from usually disposable packaging materials may lead people to make certain connections.

"Obviously, there is a conflict between mass-produced packaging material and unique haute couture made by skilled craftsmen . . . The image flow of disposable wrapping can be seen as symptomatic of the worldwide consumer frenzy," she says. "But at the same time it is also a unique, beautiful expression of human inventiveness. If you were to throw these clothes out after wearing them for just one party, it would be the ultimate decadence."

It seems that Meyer herself, like most of us, is caught between her ideals and her actions. She is against rampant consumption, but is at the same time part of affluent society.

In the wider perspective, her art aims to spark self-awareness of our social experience. "Our daily life is characterized by repetition," the artist says. "Even the best experiences and visual impressions are weakened by repetition over time. Disposable wrapping material is a symbol of repetition -- we see it all the time, yet never reflect upon it.

But when you see haute couture based on disposable wrapping material, suddenly the familiar becomes alien."