Chinese artist really shit a brick ... or made a brick out of shit in the air

[ashling]

http://qz.com/562319/a-chinese-artist-vacuumed-up-beijings-smog-for-100-days-and-made-a-brick-from-what-he-collected/

“Nut Brother,” a 34-year-old performance artist from Shenzhen, first announced his plan to vacuum the dust from Beijing’s air in late July. Every day since then, the pony-tailed guy in a work jacket—sometimes wearing a respirator mask—has walked Beijing’s streets with his vacuum, with the suction nozzle held high in the air collecting dust.

While Nut Brother’s work is getting a lot of attention in China, many wonder if the brick is really made of smog. “What can be collected to make a brick is by no means PM 2.5 [fine particulate matter that hangs in the air], but PM 250,” one Weibo user wrote (link in Chinese, registration required) under a news post about the project. “Performance art shouldn’t be a gimmick.”

Nut Brother told Quartz what he got at the end of the project was a mixture of “dust and smog” that weighed about 100 grams. Adding that to clay to make a brick that weighs “several kilograms” makes his brick not that different from ordinary ones, he admitted, but he said it is just meant to be a symbol. “I’m not doing any scientific research,” he said.

The next step, Nut Brother said, is to give the brick to a construction site, and make it part of a new building in Beijing. He would like to let the brick disappear into the concrete jungle, he said, “just like putting a drop of water in the ocean.”

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