Arts preview: He Xingyou’s photo exhibition counts the price of progress

Everything starts with something small. Just like a photograph is made up of tiny pixels, nature consists of omnipresent, vital components that He Xingyou considers crucial. The photographer aims to show how urban living and reckless construction are destroying our environment.

In his latest solo exhibition at Contemporary by Angela Li gallery, He showcases 10 works that depict our destruction of nature. They feature contemporary landscapes, which He captured in places such as Fuxing town in his home city of Chongqing and Lanzhou in Gansu province. They cover everything from landfills to mountain digging and abandoned sites in a serene, scenic style.

The idea is to create what He describes as "a sense of desolate beauty" to highlight the melancholy. He began the project in 1998, but before developing his current technique in 2002, the artist thought his works had failed to achieve what he wanted because the traditional method of obtaining a panoramic view with a wide-angle lens meant objects at each end are smaller and distorted.

He now spends at least two hours obtaining several hundred images to be combined into one single piece, but digital technology allows him to create a fresh perspective whereby everything on the periphery is properly portrayed.

"I want my audience to stop overlooking every single blade of grass, flower and pebble around us as they are all part of nature," says He.