Artist uses nature to ease pain and stress

Kong Ning, a self-taught interdisciplinary artist, enthusiastically advocates love and care for nature in her oil paintings, poems, films and performance art.

She wore a long-tailed wedding gown made of dozens of fabric leaves in a residential compound in Luoyang, Henan province, on July 15.

It was part of her ongoing One Hundred Thousand Leaves project, an initiative to raise people’s awareness of environmental issues.

More than 20 hearing-impaired children made leaf-themed drawings in Luoyang.

She kept these drawings. Since she will take the performance to other cities, she wishes to collect 100,000 children’s paintings in total.

She says she will piece them together to form a 20-meter-high leafy installation.

Returning cleanness and serenity to Earth has been at the heart of Kong’s many performances.

“I have an innocent thought that I’m a child trying to blindly steer the world in a different direction,” says the 59-year-old Beijing-based artist.

She says people have become even more indifferent about the products that finally become junk.

People won’t find lasting happiness as long as metropolises are built at the environment’s expense, she says.

Kong has created several performance works to publicize her idea that every one should be the inventor, user and maintainer of a circular economy that greens the environment.

In these works, she designs long, distinctive wedding gowns she wears as “a maid of nature”.

She puts on a different blue gown made of 300 biodegradable bags in another performance work titled H2O.