Looking for two missing persons:
1. On June 30, 2025, Brother Nut lost contact with relatives and friends in Kunming, Yunnan. As of July 2, there was still no news. In the past week, he successively exposed the harm caused by the pollution of natural gas wells and coal gangue in Xiaohoutu Township to the health of villagers. 12 public account articles were suddenly wiped out recently, suspected of being taken away by the Shaanxi police.
2. On the evening of June 30, 2025, Zheng Hongbin, the curator who has been deeply involved in the public art action of environmental pollution in Xiaohoutu since 2018 with Brother Nut, was in Xi’an and was taken away by the police. He is currently unreachable.
Portrait of Brother Nut:
Portrait of Zheng Hongbin:
Before being taken away (June 2025), the famous artist Brother Nut and Zheng Hongbin had visited Xiaohoutu Village, Yulin City, Shaanxi Province, to revisit the Xiaohoutu pollution case that they had focused on in 2018. After several rectifications, they decided to revisit this village, which was facing the “dilemma of development and survival” due to environmental pollution, water scarcity, and resource exploitation. After learning about the situation in the village, Brother Nut was shocked by the real suffering. He successively published the complex hardships and helplessness currently faced by Xiaohoutu Village on his public account @情况有点复杂, and collaborated with sheep to complete whimsical artistic behaviors…
White sheep, white flags, on the barren sand, the lives here are like the sacrifices of this land, in the battlefield where natural gas and coal interests are buried, bleating and hiding.
If netizens have any clues about the performance artist Brother Nut and Zheng Hongbin, they can leave a message on the public account background so that they can be found successfully as soon as possible.
About Brother Nut
Brother Nut: Finding freedom in meaninglessness丨Focus
“Tencent Pictures” reports on Brother Nut Click the picture to read
Brother Nut’s speech at “Yixi” Click the picture to read
What Brother Nut has done
2015 Dust Plan Click the picture to read
Brother Nut used an industrial vacuum cleaner to absorb smog in Beijing for 100 days, and he will use the dust collected in these 100 days to make a brick.
2018 Salt Plan Click the picture to read
In Yulin, Shaanxi, there is a place called Xiaohoutu, where the water and grass were once lush, with lakes like Daotu Haizi, Suode Lang Haizi, and Tao Haotu Haizi… some natural lakes that make people drunk just by listening. Nowadays, the water here has changed its taste and color
The project initiator “Brother Nut” said: “I am from Hubei, and I have had a lot of water scale since I was a child, so I have been paying attention to the water problem. Later, I heard that the water pollution in Xiaohoutu was relatively serious, so I planned this behavior art called ‘Salt Plan’, and brought 10,000 bottles of Nongfu Spring to Xiaohoutu, leaving the original clean drinking water for the local villagers, and then filled it with the polluted water, and brought it to Beijing and Xi’an for exhibition, and invited netizens to participate in the discussion and ‘endorse’ for each bottle of sewage.”
The next day after the exhibition, the Shaanxi Environmental Protection Department immediately announced that it would investigate the water pollution incident in Xiaohoutu Township.
2019 Turn Straight into Bend Psychological Counseling Center Click the picture to read
What is the reason for registering such a company?
It is mainly aimed at the phenomenon of “homosexual conversion therapy”. You see that all the relevant institutions listed in the WeChat articles are formally registered. If we oppose this topic or matter in the form of an art project, we should also target it from this level and form, so our psychological counseling company is also a legal company that has been approved by the state and has business qualifications.
2020 Shenzhen Doll Project Click the picture to read
In June of this year, tenants in Baishizhou, the largest urban village in Shenzhen, were told that they needed to move out of Baishizhou in the next few months. Many people are struggling to find a new place to live that they can afford, but Shenzhen is one of the cities with the highest rent in the world.
However, even if they try their best to find a new house outside Shenzhen, the education of their children will become a thorny issue. Many children are currently studying in schools near Baishizhou, which belongs to Nanshan District, the central area of Shenzhen. If they want to transfer to other schools in a short period of time, it is almost impossible for Shenzhen, where there is a shortage of school places.
In August, Brother Nut began to pay attention to the children’s schooling problems in Baishizhou. On the 4th, in his “Shenzhen Doll” project, he and volunteers collected about 400 dolls from the tenant families in Baishizhou, and used a giant claw machine to throw these dolls out of Shenzhen.
2020 Hunger Artist Plan “BIE” report Click the picture to read
The name of this art project is “Hunger Artist” (Weibo @Hunger Artist Plan). The executive team consists of four people: Brother Nut, Wu Laobai, Xiaoming, and Zheng Hongbin. They originally planned to recruit eleven people to protest in iron cages (they call these people hunger artists) to protest the experiences of eleven other people. The hunger artists will take turns being locked in iron cages for a day, acting according to the protest content and protest methods assigned to them, and each person will receive a reward of 2,777 yuan. In essence, “hunger artists are hired”.
The initiator of the hunger artist is named Tang Jie, who lives in Fuyang, Anhui Province. Her husband, Ge Linlin, had a private conflict with Chu Anjiang, a real estate businessman in Fuyang. Chu Anjiang knew many key figures in Fuyang. Out of revenge, he framed Ge Linlin for being involved in organized crime. On August 25, 2018, Ge Linlin was imprisoned and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Four days later, a friend of Tang Jie, under the guise of reporting Ge Linlin, met with Chu Anjiang and others in Fuyang Shanshui Tea House to chat and secretly recorded the conversation. In the recording, Chu Anjiang said: “I spent 20 million to buy Ge Linlin a 20-year prison sentence.” Converted, it would cost about 2,777 yuan a day. Chu Anjiang bought Ge Linlin’s 20-year imprisonment at this price, and Tang Jie hired eleven people at the same price, one for each injustice that had occurred.
2021 Zibo Hot Pot Fish 「All Now」report Click the picture to read
In the deep yellow river channel of the Xiaofu River section in Zibo City, Shandong Province, dozens of “fish” and “chili peppers” suddenly floated. Two men dressed as fishermen used seven or eight meters long thin bamboo poles to stir the “fish” floating on the river, and shouted in Mandarin: “Zibo～Hot Pot Fish; Zibo～Hot Pot Fish～”
Passers-by stopped, some took pictures, and some asked: “How much does this hot pot fish cost?”
“Free pricing, you have the final say!” one of the “fishermen” replied.
Artist Brother Nut is one of the two “fishermen”. This is a performance art activity initiated by him. Brother Nut told the whole now that he hopes to attract more people to pay attention to the water pollution in Zibo through this activity.
On April 1, coinciding with April Fool’s Day, the video of “Zibo Hot Pot Fish” attracted a large number of forwards and attention on the Internet.
Zibo Hot Pot Fish topped the local public comment food list
2021 Heavy Metal Country Tour Click the picture to read
Brother Nut said that in 2020, he saw the “Second National Pollution Source Census Bulletin” released by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and found that the total amount of heavy metal pollutants discharged nationwide was still high. Among the total amount of water pollutants discharged in various river basins across the country, heavy metal emissions reached more than 150 tons. He also found in the first national soil pollution survey report that nearly one-fifth of the cultivated land in the country had sampling test results exceeding the soil environmental protection standards. However, there was almost no news of such high proportions of heavy metal pollution entering the public eye. What happened behind this? How are these discharged heavy metal pollutants affecting our lives? Thus, the idea of a national heavy metal tour was born.
_In early 2021, Brother Nut began to publicly solicit clues about heavy metal pollution on the Internet, and spent four months with volunteers from the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (Green Development Association) to conduct field research in various places._ The heavy metal pollution investigation lasted for four months. The research volunteer team and the editorial team completed eight pollution investigation reports. The reports showed that: Chagan Lake was forced to accept wastewater from the production mines of enterprises, and nine administrative penalties failed to stop the discharge of industrial wastewater carrying pollutants; in Shahezi Town, Shangluo, Shaanxi, solid waste was randomly piled up, industrial wastewater dyed the river channels black, and the river channels where these polluted rivers were located were the Danjiang River Basin, the source of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project; in Yangchun, Guangdong, industrial waste copper mud even filled fish ponds, piled up near the water source, and was used as raw material for burning bricks; in many towns in Qinghai, the garbage disposal method has basically adopted open-air incineration for many years, and the garbage bins on the street are always burning garbage in the evening, gradually rising fire, and the smoke and smell of burning fill the streets; some goji berry farms in the Qaidam Basin have excessive levels of lead, cadmium, and mercury in the soil, and the goji berries produced have not met many health standards after testing, but they are still sent to all parts of the country in large quantities.
After the research, in late August, two heavy metal bands were recruited to perform in eight polluted villages in seven provinces.
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