Footage from South China’s plastic plant factories, an exploration of the conventional boundaries between nature and its imitation.

Yuyan Wang imagines a world where oil, or an oil-like substance, is the glue that holds everything together, an allegory that messes with global notions of capitalism and extraction and questions the future — of this world and ours.

Green Grey Black Brown is philosophical science fiction that exposes the dark underbelly of the plastics and tech industry. In it, a dark slime with remnants of the Jurassic era resurfaces in today’s shopping malls. The work exposes the bloody logic of petro-capitalism and the global extractive industry, which is the flip side of the tech industry’s vision of a bright future.

The installation draws viewers into a hypnotic experience of a synthetic and dystopian landscape of flowing oil and plastic. Wang works with found imagery from industrial and commercial contexts. She explores how these moving images change depending on the contexts and ways they are used and disseminated. Through rhythmic editing and a gloomy looped soundtrack – a slowed-down version of Yes’s classic 1980s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” – the meaning of the images is transformed into a powerful sensory experience.