Artist Yao Lu’s works look like classical Chinese landscape paintings, but they’re actually photographs of landfill garbage covered in construction netting. We trust you can all figure out the message here, and we don’t have to go all art school on your ass.
Yao digitally adds in the boats, pagodas, people, and other serene-looking landscape elements later — so no, nobody’s canoeing around on a river of landfill runoff. Well. Nobody’s doing it for the sake of these photographs, anyway.
If you’re in New York, you can see Yao’s work at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery.