But a closer look at these images reveals that all is not as it seems.

The images are digital composites compiled using photographs of garbage dumps. Large mounds of garbage are covered in sheets of green protective nets.  The artist photographs these mounds and then re-assembles the images to create these bucolic landscapes. Viewed quickly or from afar, these are beautiful landscape images. Closer to, they are mounds of garbage.

As China undergoes rapid industrialization and urbanization, these huge mounds of garbage are generated everywhere with significant damage to the environment.  Yao Lu has inverted the historical process. While China turns its landscape into one huge garbage dump, the artist, alchemist like, has turned garbage into the beautiful, romanticized Chinese landscape which is rapidly disappearing.

For a different take on the relationship between beauty and garbage, see the work of Edward Burtynsky.

For a closer look at Yao Lu’s images in larger format, look here.

Of his various series, two stand out.

The first is called “Running The Numbers – a portrait of consumer mass culture“.  In these two series, Jordan takes a specific number of items – a number with meaning – constructs an image with these items then photographs the image.

For instance, Shark Teeth is a collection of 270,000 fossilized shark teeth put together to construct an image of two sharks.  270,000 represents the estimated number of sharks that are killed every day around the world for their fins.

"Shark Teeth" - Full Image

Detail of fossilized shark's teeth that make up the previous image

“Midway” is a series of photographs that is emotionally much more striking than Running the Numbers.  Jordan describes this series as follows:

“These photographs of albatross chicks were made on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.”

From Series "Midway"

From Series "Midway"

I find the contrast between these two series interesting.  Running the Numbers is essentially an intellectual exercise based on shocking statistics and converted into cleverly constructed images.  Midway appeals to our raw emotions. It is a simpler series that depicts terrible consequences of our consumption. Because it’s clever, Running the Numbers is probably more likely to appeal to the art establishment.  In fact, one piece was recently included in an exhibit at the Royal Academy in London about human impact on the planet.  But, if the objective of this art were not to appeal to the artistic elite but to convince people that these issues are important and that some action is needed, which of these two series is likely to be the more effective?  I know where I’d be putting my money.

Burtynsky has made it his life’s work to create images of the imprint that Man leaves on the world. Be it the wounds on the earth created by quarry sites, tire dumping grounds, mines, the oil industry, ships and containers, whatever.  He creates sets of large scale images that bring the carelessness of the human footprint into sharp relief.

But his images of litter and widespread human vandalism are starkly beautiful. Not for him the crass, factual representation of the activist photographer or photojournalist who is unsuccessfully trying to shock us into submission.  Burtynsky approaches these sites as one would approach formal landscape or architectural photography.  He gives beauty to loathsome subject matter leaving us confused.  Is this supposed to be beautiful or dreadful?

As in all successful art, it is this confusion – the subversive effect of not knowing what is real and what is contrived – the tension between beauty and ugliness – that gives his art its power.

How come we see beauty in our own litter? And what other things do we create and consume that we have come to consider beautiful or a sign of Man’s progress and achievement when maybe they are nothing more than part of the endless garbage with which we flood our own environment.

Burtynsky’s “Manufacturing” series, is nothing short of frightening. How have we become so inured to the astronomical scale of our consumption habits that we see as normal the massive scale of production portrayed in these images?

These are the questions raised by Burtynsky’s work.  I will never again look at anything simplistically held up as an example of the beauty of Man’s achievement without wondering -  “Is it all garbage?”