Bamboo. Chengdu, China; performance as part of the Open Performance Art Festival, 2005.

In this performance Kohout focused on the incredible environmental damage done by the influx of Western capital into China. Investors move their production to China because they save enormous amounts of money on the salaries of local workers and also because of the lack of environmental regulations.
The performance took place in a wealthy country club for recently-enriched locals, who had erected a dense bamboo wall to divide their property from the local river flowing alongside the club’s prem- ises. The river was severely polluted by factories owned by Western investors and smelled terribly of chemicals. A local elder told Kohout that when she was young she used to go fishing for crayfish there, but now it was a dead river without a trace of life.
Kohout used a bamboo stick as a symbol of the local culture and nature. During the performance he painted it white and then twisted it and made a knot in it as a metaphor for the twisted inter- ests of the locals, forcibly distorted by cynical investment from Western industry owned by whites. Kohout then led the audience members to the bank of the smelly polluted river via the hole he had made in the bamboo fence. He distributed whistles to the audience and they all started whistling, trying to wake up the local population.
After about 20 minutes of whistling, confused firefighters arrived on the other side of the river, thinking there was a fire.