Benoit Aquin | Chinese Dust Bowl

Exhibition Dates: March 6 - April 10, 2010

The gallery is pleased to present “Chinese Dust Bowl”, our first solo exhibition by Canadian photographer Benoit Aquin, which depicts one of the greatest environmental disasters of our time.

“Chinese Dust Bowl” documents one of the largest conversions of productive land into sand anywhere in the world. Today, deserts cover eighteen percent of China and of those, seventy-eight percent are natural, while twenty-two percent were caused by ecologically damaging human activities such as the overexploitation of arable land, overgrazing and increasingly deep drilling for water. China’s situation is quickly becoming the world’s most massive and rapid conversion of arable land into barren sand dunes. The resulting dust is picked up by the wind and transported, in the form of giant sandstorms, all over China and into Japan, Korea and even North America.  In an effort to reverse the situation, the Chinese government has initiated the largest environmental restoration initiative the world has ever seen and has begun a mass exodus of “environmental refugees,” displaced by the advancing dust.