China's Vacuum-Cleaner Artist Turning Beijing's Smog Into Bricks

His idol is Subcomandante Marcos, the masked Mexican rebel; his weapon of choice a 1,000-watt vacuum cleaner.
Meet Nut Brother, the Chinese activist-artist attempting to vanquish toxic smog by sucking it up through a black plastic nozzle and turning it to bricks.

As the latest coal-fuelled “airpocalypse” engulfed northern China this week and world leaders gathered in Paris to debate the fight against climate change, Nut Brother hit the streets of Beijing hoping to raise awareness of his country’s deadly smog crisis.

For the last 100 days, the activist, whose real name is Wang Renzheng, has used the industrial appliance to extract dust and other lung-choking pollutants from the city’s atmosphere before transforming them into a dark brown “smog brick”.

“I want to show this absurdity to more people,” Wang, 34, said on Tuesday as pollution levels in the Chinese capital soared to levels 40 times higher than those deemed safe by the World Health Organisation.
“I want people to see that we cannot avoid or ignore this problem [and] that we must take real action.”

Nut Brother, who was born in Hubei province and is based in the southern city of Shenzhen, began to execute his plan in July after convincing a restaurant owner to contribute 10,000 yuan (£1,000) to his pollution-themed performance art project.

He ordered a vacuum cleaner from a manufacturer in Shanghai and began taking it on four-hour sorties across Beijing’s urban sprawl, gobbling up pollutants as he went. Photographs published in the Chinese media this week showed him pushing his vacuum cleaner past some of Beijing’s most celebrated landmarks.
One image shows him sucking up dust outside Rem Koolhaas’s cloud-puncturing China Central Television headquarters; in another he is seen strolling past the portrait of Mao Zedong at the entrance to the Forbidden City.

Nut Brother said his attempts to suck up smog from Tiananmen Square – perhaps the most heavily guarded public space on earth – had triggered his only brush with the law. “They sent a plainclothes policeman to follow me but they didn’t impede my movements,” he recalled.