Artist uses nature to ease pain and stress

Kong Ning, a self-taught interdisciplinary artist, enthusiastically advocates love and care for nature in her oil paintings, poems, films and performance art.

She wore a long-tailed wedding gown made of dozens of fabric leaves in a residential compound in Luoyang, Henan province, on July 15.

It was part of her ongoing One Hundred Thousand Leaves project, an initiative to raise people's awareness of environmental issues.

More than 20 hearing-impaired children made leaf-themed drawings in Luoyang.

She kept these drawings. Since she will take the performance to other cities, she wishes to collect 100,000 children's paintings in total.

She says she will piece them together to form a 20-meter-high leafy installation.

Returning cleanness and serenity to Earth has been at the heart of Kong's many performances.

"I have an innocent thought that I'm a child trying to blindly steer the world in a different direction," says the 59-year-old Beijing-based artist.

She says people have become even more indifferent about the products that finally become junk.

People won't find lasting happiness as long as metropolises are built at the environment's expense, she says.

Kong has created several performance works to publicize her idea that every one should be the inventor, user and maintainer of a circular economy that greens the environment.

In these works, she designs long, distinctive wedding gowns she wears as "a maid of nature".

She puts on a different blue gown made of 300 biodegradable bags in another performance work titled H2O.

She displayed the work in Venice in June. Each bag is shaped like a person. The dress' tail is about 40 meters long.

She says the gown feels both fragile and weightless once it's inflated, indicating a balance between humans and nature.

"A person comes into this world and leaves as lightly as a drop of water falling from the universe," she says.

The theme of love highlights Kong's oil paintings. She expresses fear and doubt, too.

A large-eyed girl, who looks like her, appears in many of her works, which boast a vivid palette and surreal scenes. Her eyes open wide to show innocence. Her outstretched arms seem ready to explore the world. But her twisted body suggests hesitation caused by the fear of getting hurt.

Kong was a criminal lawyer decades before she turned to painting in 2000.

Her experience has left many emotional scars, she says.

In 2000, the death of her mother added to her depression. She quit law and isolated herself from the outside world, she says, until one day, she bought painting supplies and tried to paint something to kill the time.

She says she felt her sadness and anxieties ease as she painted. She also started to feel stronger and joyful.

Since then, she has been painting feverishly as a salvation from feeling helpless. She also creates installations, poems and performance art.