What a waste

Tons of sterilised domestic and industrial waste lay strewn across the gallery floor. Against one wall mounds of unidentifiable detritus are shrouded with ribbons of black tape like seaweed on rocks. Beyond, the work of sifting and sorting and baling recyclable material has begun. Despite the sanitisation, the place reeks. All around are the sounds of Guangdong — of the ships, the trucks, the machines and the people involved in processing the rubbish that the developed world has dumped in China. On the walls, in both Mandarin and English, a litany of statistics and quotations offers a damning indictment of the environmental and public health disaster of this ugly new China Trade.

The irony of the venue is not lost on artist Liu Jianhua. We are in the Shanghai Gallery of Art, a handsome new commercial space opened in 2004 at Three on the Bund, one of the grandest of the old colonial commercial buildings that line one side of the Huangpu River.