The artist Lao Yu disguises pictures of China’s environmental problems in the tropes of traditional Chinese art.
Landscape paintings have a rich history in China, but for many westerners who aren’t fluent in the tradition (read: many of us), there’s maybe a tendency to look them with a certain myopia–to see them as tropes or emblems of exotica, or simply to fail to give them the attention they deserve. But the work of contemporary Chinese artist Yao Lu demands that we look closely, lest we miss what’s actually there.
From the right vantage point, the images in Yao’s “New Landscapes” series bear a striking similarity to classic Chinese landscapes, from their wispy clouds floating between mountain peaks, right down to the presence of traditional red “appreciation seals,” small stamps that historically functioned as signatures for artists and studios. But those bucolic settings are in fact digitally altered composite photographs of mounds of garbage that the artist has covered with green mesh. That pastoral hillside? It’s more like a landfill. That babbling brook? A littered roadside.
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