Created within the Nomadic Art Project – Caohao “Collection” Art Residency Program at Caohai, Guizhou—an artist-initiated residency of which I was both a co-initiator and participating artist.

"Nomadic" is a long-term, self-initiated art project by a group of artists, which aims to activate the perception and collision of artists by organizing at least one art residency (in different settings and with different themes) every year, and to explore new "possibilities" and "values" in an uncertain present through art exchanges, sharing, discussions, screenings, and exhibitions.

Process

• Wearing clean clothes

• Entering, through the mouth of a cave, an area littered with trash left by tourists

• Using the body to remove trash encountered along the way

• Trash gradually accumulating across the entire body

• Leaving through the same cave entrance, carrying the trash-covered body out

Artist Statement

This work was directly triggered by an encounter during my residency at Caohai in Weining, Guizhou. A natural area had been overtaken by trash discarded by tourists, while free-grazing cattle foraged among it. On the rocks nearby, bright yellow graffiti reading “SB Mountain” sat beside this scene—an abrasive reality in plain sight. I renamed the site, with deliberate irony, “Cute Mountain,” and used it as the point of departure for a performance and video intervention.

The video component combines performance documentation with field-based reportage to construct a layered narrative: one set of images captures the everyday absurdity of abandoned trash and cattle feeding within it; the other records my bodily response in the same location.

I set a physical rule for the performance: instead of using my hands—the habitual convenience of picking things up—I forced other parts of my body to collect, hook, and carry the waste. I wanted to probe the coerced, primal contact between the body and discarded matter, and the instinctive repulsion it provokes. In the process, trash shifts from an object to be handled into an alien, coercive shaper. Its physical properties discipline my posture in reverse: to keep bowls balanced on my back, I have to hunch forward, gradually transforming into a stumbling “trash aggregate.”

By turning myself into a moving landscape made of the remnants of consumption, I stage a visual accusation. The work functions as an embodied allegory, exposing how consumer behaviour erodes nature—and how that erosion ultimately folds back onto our own form and dignity. I end by presenting this image of a “trash aggregate” as a silent warning: what we discard casually will return to us, in ways we can no longer ignore.