Wind Bell
Art Newspaper (Chinese edition) 2023-10-13Heavy metals are metals with a density greater than 5 g/cm 3. Most of them are not essential for life activities and can be harmful to organisms when they are excessive. Usually, the excessive presence of heavy metals in the environment is due to human activities such as industrial production, and includes metals such as copper, lead, cadmium, and mercury. More importantly, heavy metal elements have extremely high stability and are easily transferred but not easily removed, which can cause long-lasting damage to the environment. The ultra-stability of heavy metals means that their presence will outlast human life, and the heavy metals left behind by human activities will affect the characteristics of the Earth both now and in the future. The persistent changes that heavy metal residues cause in the environment are universal, so I believe there is a great deal of potential for using heavy metals in the environment as a starting point for creation.
So I began to pay attention to Guiyu, a small town located on the outskirts of Shantou. Since the 1990s, it has been receiving electronic waste from abroad and refining metals from the waste through crude metallurgical techniques. Along with this process that has not been strictly managed and finely operated comes the emission of chemical substances, heavy metals, and organic pollutants into the environment - Guiyu was labeled as "the most toxic place on Earth" in the early 2000s. Since the remediation began in 2013, almost a decade has passed. Have those heavy metals been eliminated? From transnational waste trade to regional environmental exploitation, and to how humans face their own improper behavior, the issues raised due to Guiyu's environmental problems carry a lot of weight.
Among the heavy metal pollutants in Guiyu town, copper contamination levels and the scope of contamination are among the highest. This is because a large number of electronic products use components such as copper wires and copper plates, and copper exists in many forms, making it very easy to transfer, spread, and deposit. Copper is present in almost every corner of Guiyu town: in water, soil, plants, and even in human hair and placenta.
Copper comes from the mining of copper ore, which originates from magma. In ancient times, copper slept in the mountains as a part of rocks. As time passed, copper was used to make ritual vessels and other objects that symbolized "human civilization". The appearance, shape, and sound of the copper vessels formed people's understanding of copper. Today, copper is a widely used and inexpensive metal. It is the best material for conductors and the material basis for the realization of the electronic world. Looking to the future, as the world becomes more virtual, heavy metals such as copper will inevitably spread in the environment with the development of the electronic industry. When the human race has fallen silent, copper will not only lie dormant in the mountains but will be engraved in all natural creations as a tombstone of human civilization.
How can we perceive anomalies in the ordinary? Heavy metals deposited in the environment have been transformed into other forms, and detection can only present the fact of their presence in numerical terms. When the wind blows on a plant, the gentle frictional sound definitely doesn't make people think of the heavy metal elements contained inside the plant. If the heavy metals in its body are extracted and reduced, what sound will it make when it is blown by the wind?
I want to make people aware of all of this through the sound of a wind chime. I will extract copper from local plants such as rice and reeds, and shape it into a small wind chime that will sway in the fields with all things and emit a unique metallic sound in the wind. As the seasons change and things come and go, the sound of the wind chime will coexist with this land.
We metallise from peaks, from electronics and from plants, showing the circulation of heavy metals in human activities.
Where everything begins
My previous works started from the properties of organisms that respond to environmental changes, such as the absorption and degradation ability of fungal mycelia to petroleum and the enrichment ability of heavy metals in soil. This is where I started to look at the problem of heavy metal pollution in soil, and I also began to work on other organisms with the ability to enrich heavy metals.
Heavy metal pollution in the city is often associated with mining, metallurgy, electroplating and other industries. Among them, electronic metallurgy is particularly noteworthy. Electronic products have become a new source of minerals; countless discarded electronic products have been seen as the gold mines of recyclers, of which Guiyu is one. Here, the metal components that have once constructed the virtual world are dismantled, melted, and turned to wastes, then they are discharged into rivers, where they enter another network of life.
I tried to reconnect the broken chains through this project – “Windchime”. Everything that we toss on the earth because of electronic metallurgy does not evaporate. The metals are taken in and excreted by animals and plants as the river flows. They remain an existence beyond life and death. I was able to collect these released metal elements in Guiyu.
Ten years in Guiyu
It has been about ten years since the beginning of the remediation of Guiyu. I was just an outsider in Guiyu, wandering around and conversing, more of an 'observer' than a 'researcher'. When I first arrived in Guiyu, I thought it would be a small town with workshops and piles of white plastic bags everywhere. But now the black smoke and pungent smell have disappeared. Most of the workshops in the town only deal with the disassembly and sorting of electronic products, while the highly polluting processes such as acid leaching are operated by recycling companies that are environmental friendly. Some areas in Guiyu have transformed into factories like lingerie factories and headphone factories. It feels like everything has come into a new order. But as I walked further down the lanes, I could still see the grimy river, the remains of burned electronic scrap and piles of sludge. These untreated corners are still haunted by pollution.
The efforts made over the past decade have certainly been helpful, but I was insisted on finding out whether there are still an excessive amount of heavy metals despite all these great undertakings. Are the heavy metals that entered and settled deep underground still there? Has the persistence of these heavy metals been etched into people's memories of that time? I am intrigued by the stark contrast between the momentary act of people discarding metal waste and the lasting residue of heavy metals on this land that exceeds human generations.
I was most impressed by the fact that each of the houses in Guiyu has its own name, which was written on a plaque above the main entrance – Caixing House, Zhenxing House, Dexing House, Hongtai House, Zhengui House, Huafa House……I could see from these names that the villagers aspired to make their own way in this remote and deprived land, and many of them actually did. People put their dreams in the name of the building, and while heading towards the beautiful picture that they desire, they had to acquire the land. The price for the success of countless E-gold seekers was that the land was left without a potable water source. Through the names of some of the small villages, I could picture how beautiful they once were, yet such beauty is no longer there, and the reality certainly brings a great contrast. In a village called Shuxiang (which means “Fragrant Tree”), the river water is dirty and polluted, and in another called “Abundant Valley”, there is no farmland left for cultivation.
Copper Tracing
Two steps are involved to trace the copper element. First, to identify areas where heavy metals residues may exist and to collect plants enriched with heavy metal elements. Then, the metallic elements are reduced from the gathered plant samples.
I felt like I was on an adventure as I wandered and searched through Guiyu. I followed my intuition and let it lead me to the right place; I mobilized my body and all the energy that I have to get to know this place.I had read much of the research literature on Guiyu before I started my work, but it still took some luck to find a suitable area for collecting plant samples. Very often, I could not tell with the naked eye where the plants that contain heavy metal are. Moreover, the selection of plant samples as well as the metal reduction was a challenge for me – after all, I am an amateur in this respect.
I found a significant amount of copper in one of the plant samples I had collected, and it was my luck to be able to spot it. Yet how the copper could be extracted from the samples was a more challenging problem. I thought I could count on some kind of technique that was already known in the market, like maybe I could find a lab to help me with such work. But as this is a very niche area of work, many of the institutes and labs I had contacted do not specialize in such work, not to mention that normally laboratories can only carry minute experiments but not deal with hundreds of pounds of samples. I have hit a bottleneck. I had a good theoretical understanding of how to extract metal compounds from plants, but when it came to the practicalities, I neither knew any detailed procedures of the experiment nor could I do it myself. Luckily, I eventually found a laboratory that could assist me with my work, and with the instruction of the lab staff, I finally got the copper extracted. When I review the whole thing, I find that the technical know-how is not that complicated, but since I’m not an expert, there are always difficulties to be experienced in order to succeed.
The Microcosm
The world that we live in is intricate and we may not be able to explain what is happening simply through reports and data. That’s why, when considering how to present my project, I felt the need to bring into being something more visual and perceptual rather than just putting a bunch of data in front of the audience since that is not subtle enough, although my research contain a lot of data. I thought of the sound of the wind, the swish of the grass, and how metal sounds when hitting each other……things that we all feel in our daily lives. I wanted to make a metal object out of the metal extracted from the plant samples and let it swing and chime in the wind. By that we can all feel the contrast between the softness of life and the hardness of metal.
I have been surprised by microorganisms. They have their own way of being and unique laws of life. I enjoy culturing fungi and I often change conditions for them, noticing how that has brought new changes to the fungi, by which I have got to know how variable it is and it nourishes my art as well.
I tried to relate what I had observed from the fungus to what had happened in our society as a starting point for explaining a certain topic. Previously, I mentioned about the ability of fungal hyphae to absorb and degrade oil, and I found it possible to create a dialogue with an oil spill at sea that happed not so long ago. Yet I didn’t just take the fungi as a solution, because that would be like a flea trying to move a tree, and I feel so small. But it’s this sense of smallness that I want to highlight. Individuals may feel powerless when facing their wish for saving their homeland, and there may be no solution to this feeling of powerlessness, but it can be transmitted between people through art works. I made a small boat with mushrooms that have the ability to degrade, and I asked the villagers to row it across the oil-covered sea. This small boat with limited purification power contrasts strongly with the vast sea and the numerous oil factories on the shore. Such overwhelming comparison makes the effort of restoration seem like a bubble, bursting with futility.
Written by Long Pan