Out near the Sheffield Arena there’s a recycling tip. Thousands of people pass it everyday but you wouldn’t know it was there unless you wound down a window and breathed the chemicals, or lost your way and turned around on the slip-road that takes you there. Perhaps some people found Chinese Arboretum 91 this way. The image of a slight, yellow tree in dense forest foliage appeared for a couple of weeks on the billboard space next to the tip, above the tatty piece of pavement the drivers use to off load the skips. Once when I was there a man appeared and started photographing the road and then turned around and began photographing the billboard. He said it was his job to record the adverts, he had come to take pictures of the giant trio of hoardings next to the road but turned around because he’d never seen anything like it, he said it was beautiful.
Michelle Cotton, Curator, S1 Artspace

Chinese Arboretum
2003-ongoing
100 images of Chinese trees for billboards

Commissioned by S1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK

Selected examples:

Stop, wait, go, Lui Chun repeats in her head, as she directs traffic from her platform. Above her the traffic lights go on changing. No 91
Photograph printed onto billboard paper Installation Greenland Road, Sheffield
3 x 6 m

That’s it, enough, curses Qu Yuan as he is soaked again by a passing truck. He hails a taxi and shoves his bicycle in the back. No 80
Medium format transparency

The cockerel watches the chicken’s legs kick in the air. How did she get upside down and where is her head, he ponders. No 94
Photograph printed onto billboard paper Installation London Road, Sheffield

Chen Zefang has just bought some new trick playing cards. He is excited that magic is making a comeback. No 66
Medium format transparency