Yun Hong: The Green Project
Title:
- The Green Project
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Medium:
- Screening/’Media Art’ Piece
Artist Statement:
In recent decades, China has had a severe environmental crisis with millions of people suffering from bad air, polluted water and vegetation degradation. Instead of finding sustainable solutions, some local governments make a “big show” of decorating landscape surfaces by using “artificial colors”, such as paint, fabric, or printed imagery to physically cover the no-longer naturally colored environments. At Laoshou Hill, thousands of square meters of mountain were painted green to hide red coal mine pits. In Beijing, the sky surprisingly became blue and clear during special “showing” days like the Olympic Games to let “guests” forget the extremely high concentration of PM2.5.
In this work, I use the standardized/ industrial meadow green to highlight this “artificial color”. I call it “The Green Project”, a camouflage by the government that uses fantasy to maintain power structures. In this situation, the environment becomes an artificial landscape where citizens are forced to exist within it. The green is a portal to travel between the decayed reality and the fictionalization nature, it blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality, covers the truth with layers of deceit, which makes people’s trust in the government evaporate. The more layers of color, the “greyer” the truth becomes.
