Find out why performance artist threw 500g of grain-shaped gold away
Artist Yang Yexin with gold grains by the city's Huangpu River.
Throwing money into the river? That may sounds unreasonable, but it did happen recently in Shanghai.
Artist Yang Yexin completed a performance art on October 13 by throwing about 900 grains of rice made of fine gold into the city's Huangpu River and many other urban corners like trash bins, manholes and grasslands, the Shanghai Observer reported.
A single gold grain.
A gold grain about to go into a waste bin.
Grains of gold left on grass.
Yang's shocking act soon triggered controversy on social media, with many confused netizens condemning it a grandstand and huge waste.
Yang replied on Friday that his act was simply a satire about the waste of food on the 41st World Food Day, October 16.
He aimed to alert people to the severity of waste, and call for food to be treasured.
"One can hardly take the act of waste seriously until it is enlarged to an extreme level like this," Yang explained. He threw another 100 gold grains away on that day.
A sanitation worker passing by showed a look of disbelief when Yang told her he was throwing gold, the report said.
Handfuls of gold grains.
Yang said in an interview that he spent 230,000 yuan (US$35,738) to buy 500g gold from an reputable online jewelry dealer and had them made into grain shapes about a month ago.
Yang commented: "Throwing away food is nothing short of discarding gold."
The gold is the exact size of a grain of rice.
"Gold is part of the earth soil while throwing away cooked rice will post a threat to our environment," Yang said.
Yang said what he created was at spiritual level that can't be measured by money.
"The amount of money will be far more valuable if people take the chance to reflect on waste and build up good habits," Yang said.
