As more and more ozone depleting humans start crowding together, we’re going to eventually stain the entire world with concrete streets and flickering street lights. Mountains are going to glow like man-made volcanoes, rivers are going to become brown sludge and new urban cities will be carved into whatever is left of nature. This digitally created art piece by Yang Yongliang shows what that bleak future will look like. It’s mesmerising.
Called Sleepless Wonderland, the piece is purposely made to look like traditional Chinese paintings (it reminds me of the classic Yellow Mountain paintings). But even with its traditional roots, it’s not hard to imagine this as the setting for a future calibrating science fiction movie. The image is static but you can almost already feel how this world works. Each mountain tower has its own rules, every resource is becoming more and more scarce and colour is just shades of grey. In Yang Yongliang’s vision of the future, this is both the last place you’d want to live on Earth and the last place to live on Earth.
If you look closer at the piece, you can see buildings you already recognise and see that the mountains are actually building clusters — open land is just another building’s roof.
Check out more of Yang Yongliang’s work here. [Galerie Paris-Beijing via Colossal]