Artist sucks up bad Beijing air with a vacuum for 400 hours
BEIJING — For four hours every day, for 100 days, Chinese artist Wang Renzheng held up the attachment of an industrial vacuum cleaner to suck in Beijing’s notoriously polluted air at various landmarks.
Passers-by were intrigued, inquiring if he was an air sanitation worker, or if he was taking air samples, or if he could be hired to do air sweeps of their apartments, Wang recalled.
The 34-year-old artist hopes the performance art — dubbed the Dust Project — can sharpen the public’s sense of China’s air quality.
“Have you ever thought how much dust there is in the air, as Chinese cities are growing at high speeds?” Wang said.
Although the public has come to realize the severity of China’s air pollution, Wang said he believes the change has been painfully slow.
“This is not an issue to be ignored, and I want to magnify it so much that you cannot ignore it,” he said.
Coincidentally, the project’s 100-day phase of dust-collecting ended Sunday — right in the middle of this year’s worst pollution spell in Beijing, when its landmark buildings disappeared into thick smog and residents were asked to stay indoors.
Monitoring sites reported the density of tiny, poisonous PM2.5 particles reached more than 40 times the safe level set by the World Health Organization.
Wang said his 400 hours of air-sucking netted 100 grams of dust, which has been added to a mixture to make a brick.
Once the brick is made, it will be used in construction along with other bricks. “It should just disappear like a drop of water going into the sea,” Wang said.