This work emerged from my fascination with the uneasy dialogue between the synthetic and the natural. I created a full-body suit from yellow artificial turf, a material designed to mimic the surface of a hayfield, and wore it while rolling across an actual field of dry grass. From a distance, my body nearly disappeared into the landscape, until movement exposed me as something out of place—an awkward, hybrid presence caught between camouflage and revelation.

The suit is not simply a costume; it is a second skin made of petroleum-based fibers, a plastic parody of nature. By staging myself in a rural field, I wanted to collapse the distance between what is real and what is manufactured, to expose the fragility of that boundary. The body that emerges is not quite human, not quite environment, but a strange amalgam—part scarecrow, part monster, part synthetic apparition.

My rolling gesture rejects the logic of agricultural labor that once defined human relations to the land. Instead of cultivation or harvest, I enact a movement that is purposeless, clumsy, and childlike. This futility highlights the absurdity of attempting to “return to nature” while enveloped in plastic.

Plastic Pastoral asks what happens when the pastoral ideal—the vision of harmony between humans and the landscape—is reconstructed through artificial materials. The work inhabits the paradox of our time: that we simulate nature endlessly, even as we erode the ground beneath it. By masking myself in synthetic hay, I become both invisible and conspicuous, both part of the field and its intruder.

In this tension, I find the image of a contemporary pastoral—one where the idyll is no longer green and fertile, but plastic, precarious, and estranged.

© LIU SHIMING ART FOUNDATION,

COURTESY OF LIU SHIMING ART FOUNDATION

© LITE ZHANG, COURTESY OF LITE ZHANG