Meet Brother Nut, the artist who created an exhibition with 9K bottles filled with dirty water

Here's why Brother Nut is making headlines:

WHO?
Brother Nut is an performance artist based in Beijing, China.


WHAT ABOUT BROTHER NUT?
He stacked the Chinese supermarket shelves with rows of bottled water, but though the packaging is that of ubiquitous Chinese brand Nongfu Spring, the liquid inside is brown and cloudy.

BROWN AND CLOUDY?
The scene is part of an exhibit at Beijing’s 798 Art Zone. Brother Nut filled the bottles with water from Xiaohaotu, a poor township in China’s Shaanxi province where the water is reportedly polluted with heavy metals.

WHAT WAS HIS PURPOSE?
Brother Nut, 37, said he was moved to create the performance piece after traveling in Xiaohaotu, where he met residents who, he said, were suffering from high rates of cancer and skin diseases. The villagers had complained for years to the provincial authorities, but the government did little to mitigate the problem, he said.

IS THE EXHIBITION STILL ON?
It was shut down in response to complaints by Nongfu Spring about trademark infringement. The police confiscated the 9,000 bottles but Brother Nut has another 1,000 bottles which he is displaying them in an old military van, known as the Moving Art Museum.

OFFBEAT EXHIBIT, INDEED.
This is not the wackiest thing Brother Nut has done. His best known work is 2015's 'Project Dust', which consisted of the creation of a brick made entirely from particulate matter vacuumed out of heavily-polluted Beijing city air. This project spotlighted Beijing's ongoing air pollution problems at a time when China sought to recast itself as an environmentally-aware nation.

GO NUT!