Brother Nut is an internationally-known

performance artist Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

based in

Beijing Beijing, Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Peking, is the capital city of China. With more than 22 million residents, it is the world's List of national capitals by population, most populous national capital city as well as ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. He is known only by his pseudonym, 坚果兄弟, which is also sometimes translated in English as "Nut Brother." He was born in

Shenzhen Shenzhen is a prefecture-level city in the province of Guangdong, China. A Special economic zones of China, special economic zone, it is located on the east bank of the Pearl River (China), Pearl River estuary on the central coast of Guangdong ...

Guangdong ) means "wide" or "vast", and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. The name "''Guang''" ultimately came from Guangxin ( zh, labels=no, first=t, t= , s=广信), an outpost established in Han dynasty ...

in 1981.

Career

His best known work is 2015's "Project Dust," which consisted of the creation of a brick made entirely from

particulate matter Particulate matter (PM) or particulates are microscopic particles of solid or liquid matter suspended in the air. An ''aerosol'' is a mixture of particulates and air, as opposed to the particulate matter alone, though it is sometimes defin ...

vacuumed out of heavily polluted Beijing city air. This project spotlighted Beijing's ongoing

air pollution Air pollution is the presence of substances in the Atmosphere of Earth, air that are harmful to humans, other living beings or the environment. Pollutants can be Gas, gases like Ground-level ozone, ozone or nitrogen oxides or small particles li ...

problems at a time when China sought to recast itself as an environmentally-aware nation. Project Dust received press coverage in the United States and Europe, as well as in Asian press. An online photo gallery is also maintained to summarize the activity of the project. In 2016 Nut Brother was a speaker at the Enter the Anthropocene Creative Time Summit in Washington DC. In 2018, he made headlines again with his project, “ Nongfu Spring Market” in which he exhibited 9000 bottles of polluted water from the village of Xiaohaotu, in Shaanxi. The bottled water was then exhibited in the form of a street market set up in the 798 Art District in Beijing. While the art show was shut down by authorities, the government also began investigations into the town's water pollution problems. In 2020, he was profiled on the Al Jazeera documentary ''101 East: China's Activist Artist'', which showed him collecting toys from children in Baishizhou which would be used for an art work involving a giant game of grab (as in an arcade claw machine), which would highlight the eviction of families in the area.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brother Nut Chinese performance artists Chinese contemporary artists 1981 births Pollution Living people