December 2, 2015
The artist “Brother Nut” vacuuming the dust near the Beijing National Stadium on Nov. 15, Day 87 of his project to turn the city’s pollution into a tangible brick.
Dong Dalu/CFP
Beijing has been swamped for days in a beige-gray miasma of smog, bringing coughs and rasping, hospitals crowded from respiratory ailments, a midday sky so dim that it could pass for evening, and head-shaking disgust from residents who had hoped the city was over the worst of its chronic pollution.
For 100 days, Brother Nut dragged a roaring, industrial-strength vacuum cleaner around the Chinese capital’s landmarks, sucking up dust from the atmosphere. Now he has mixed the accumulated gray gunk with red clay to create a small but potent symbol of the city’s air problems.
“Dust represents the side effects of humankind’s development, including smog and building-site dust,” he explained in an interview on Tuesday, surrounded by a huddle of Chinese reporters. “When I first arrived in Beijing, I wore a hygienic mask for a few days, but later I stopped. In smog like this, there’s no escaping.”
Reports in the Chinese news media about his “Project Dust” have coincided with the worst smog in more than a year across northern China, and Brother Nut — which is Jianguo Xiongdi in Mandarin Chinese, as he insists on calling himself — has catapulted to instant minor fame in this city, where people talk about ups and downs in PM2.5 air pollution with the same familiarity that the English reputedly discuss rainfall.
“Nearly everyone in Beijing would have a brick in their stomachs. Older people, maybe five,” said one of over 4,000 often-rueful comments on an online photo gallery of Brother Nut’s project.
“If all of the dust in Beijing was collected together, it would be enough to build the world’s biggest environmental protection bureau,” said another.
The wave of smog across northern China also arrived shortly before the start on Monday of negotiations in Paris, where governments hope to settle on a new agreement to reduce the greenhouse gas pollution causing global warming. Much of that smog originates from the same coal-fire boilers, vehicle exhausts and industrial plants that pump out carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
But Brother Nut, a slim 34-year-old with a ponytail, smirked at suggestions that he might become a spokesman for efforts to clean up the environment. His intention was philosophical, he said.
“What I’ve done is like Sisyphus rolling his giant stone,” he said, referring to the ancient Greek myth about a king punished by eternally rolling a stone uphill, only to have it roll back down. “There’s no use, but it can make more people think about this issue. It’s a spiritual thing.”
Even without Brother Nut’s inspiration, many people in Beijing and other smog-afflicted cities have been upset about the latest inundation.
The Chinese government has promised to clean up the pollution, especially PM2.5, the tiny particles that can cause respiratory illness and other health problems. Indeed for much of this year, the air across Beijing and other cities has been cleaner, perhaps also partly thanks to a slowdown in industrial production.
But the fresh onslaught of smog has brought complaints from residents that local governments in Beijing and other cities were complacent and ill-prepared for the pollution buildup in static winter air. The capital issued an “orange alert” — the second-highest pollution warning — for the first time since February 2014.
Forecasters have said that winds may start to disperse the smog over Beijing and other cities by Wednesday.
Some residents, however, have complained that the government should have early on issued a “red alert,” which would have brought more stringent controls on vehicles and other sources of pollution and required schools to close.
“The Beijing city government’s insufficient alerting system has compounded the problem,” Dong Liansai, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace East Asia, said in an email.
“The current severe pollution comes after a year of improvements in average air quality,” Mr. Dong said. “Though not reflective of this trend, the pollution which has shrouded much of China since last week shows that much more must be done.”
The World Health Organization recommends that PM2.5 pollutants should rise no higher than an average 25 micrograms per cubic meter across 24 hours. But in Beijing, readings across the city hit as high as 976 micrograms in one suburb. The United States Embassy’s air quality monitor for PM2.5 reached close to 700 on Monday night and was close to 600 on Tuesday.
Brother Nut said he was no expert on PM2.5 pollution or its ill effects.
He usually works in Shenzhen, a commercial city in southern China that has much cleaner air, thanks to the proximity of the sea. But he said he felt inspired to do something about the air problem in Beijing and started roving with a 6,800 renminbi, or $1,060, vacuum cleaner from July. He took rainy days off, and he also stayed off the streets during a big military parade, and for months the air was better than he feared, he said.
Dragging along the hefty machine with rechargeable batteries, he visited near Tiananmen Square, the National Center for the Performing Arts, the China Central Television tower and other landmarks. In this usually security-sensitive city, the police were sometimes curious, but he was not harassed, he said.
Some onlookers failed to fathom his artistic purpose and mistook him for a high-tech street sweeper, he said.
“Some people thought, ‘Wow, Beijing’s really awesome,’ ” he said. “ ‘Now they’ve got air cleaners like this.’ They asked me how much money I made. Some thought I was selling vacuum cleaners.”
He also encountered a real street sweeper, he said, and “he asked me to vacuum a bit and I did.”
Brother Nut finished his vacuuming expeditions over the weekend and is now waiting for the brick formed from his dust to be baked at a kiln in Tangshan, an industrial city 95 miles east of Beijing. Already, he said, he has received offers to buy the brick of up to 10,000 renminbi. But Brother Nut said he would leave the brick, without any fanfare, in an anonymous building site.
“This brick will then disappear as if it had been dropped into the ocean,” he said. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
