Three Quirky Projects Make Art Out Of China's Polluted Air

Featured on nationalgeographic.com

Dirty air is part of life in China, unavoidable and in your face. It has inspired a tremendous boom in renewable energy, as the Chinese government begins to try to wean the country off coal. It has also inspired a level of citizen action that is unusual in an autocratic country.

And some of those active citizens are artists.

1. SMOG-WALKING, LIVE

Liu Bolin didn’t set out to make art about polluted air, but the subject found him anyway. His bright, high-ceilinged studio sits at the end of an alleyway lined with brick buildings, on the outskirts of Beijing in an old industrial neighborhood now known as the 798 art district. He moved there after his previous studio was razed in one of the waves of redevelopment that have transformed the city.

The loss got him thinking about where individuals fit in modern urban life, and it led to a series of performance pieces in which he has sought to make himself disappear—a project he called “Hide in the City.” In its latest iteration, he fixed 24 cell phones to a bright orange life vest—12 on the front, 12 on the back—and began live-streaming his walks around Beijing.

He meant it mostly as a meditation on the ubiquity of technology. It turned out to offer a disturbing perspective on the thick clouds of pollution hanging in the sky as he roamed the streets.

Suffering through the pollution, “I would feel very uncomfortable, I find it very difficult to breathe, and I thought ‘This place is not a very good place to live,’” Liu says. The orange vest is on display behind him, on a mannequin made of phone charging cords. “I wanted to use this as a way to present my surroundings.”

“Different people have different ways to express their feelings. Playwrights have their own ways, novelists have their own ways,” he says. “This is just my way to express my feelings.”

Click here to read the full article.