Camouflage Syndrome
2024–Ongoing
Armed conflicts, with their intense explosions, destruction, and casualties, often leave little room to attend to the issue of military pollution. Military pollution primarily arises from the use of weapons and explosions, fuel leaks, and the long-term presence of war remnants. Common pollutants include heavy metals and explosive residues. These toxic substances continue to act on the environment through deposition and dispersion, persisting in soil and vegetation over time; their effects are often dispersed, delayed, and difficult to directly identify or attribute.
Camouflage Syndrome revolves around war-related military pollution. Through field investigation, sample analysis, and on-site action, it enters those environmental consequences that persist after war yet remain difficult to identify and attribute. The project treats plants as a kind of developing agent, using them to discern changes within contaminated environments and as a starting point for subsequent transformation and action. Scattered, hidden, and delayed traces of pollution are reorganized here, becoming something that can be seen, touched, and judged as a concrete presence.
Photograph by Liu Shuai, Syria
Field
Since 2024, I have conducted fieldwork in northern Syria, Northeast China, and Laos, entering environments shaped by different phases of war. I collect and analyze soil and plant samples to trace how military pollution persists. Some of these samples come from non-hotspot areas that rarely enter public view, where contamination tends to remain dispersed, delayed, and difficult to identify.
The current phase of the work is primarily focused on northern Syria.
Traces
Camouflage
Materials: Fig, caper, lemon, and other locally occurring leaves (collected in northern Syria), soil, concrete dust, and cotton paper.
Variable dimensions
Near sites of explosions, I collected plant leaves that showed abnormal changes and conducted laboratory analyses. The results revealed significantly elevated levels of heavy metals such as nickel, chromium, cadmium, and lead—elements commonly associated with military pollution. Some of the leaves had developed discoloration, curling, and even necrosis during their growth, becoming a direct and open medium through which these pollutants are revealed. They form the core material of the project, even though they are inherently hazardous.
During my fieldwork, I encountered military camouflage patterns from different periods. Camouflage is the appropriation and occupation of the visual language of nature by human military systems. It also functions as the skin of different factions, forming a layered intersection of human politics, military systems, and the natural world. For local residents, the frequent yet constantly shifting presence of camouflage acts as a strong visual warning, even a trigger of trauma.
I gradually came to realize that the postwar landscape itself takes on a camouflage-like condition. Military pollution is not entirely invisible; it leaves traces in soil, plants, and the surface of the land. Yet these traces are often dispersed, delayed, and difficult to consolidate into coherent evidence. They exist, but resist clear identification, localization, and attribution. In this sense, camouflage and pollution share a mechanism: both allow harm to remain within the visible while continuing to evade recognition within the environment.
In response, I cut and collage the affected leaves into the camouflage patterns I recorded during my fieldwork. Here, camouflage no longer serves concealment, but is reversed into a structure of revelation. Patterns once used to help military targets blend into their surroundings are reoriented to register the land’s response to the consequences of war. The work does not aim to represent pollution, but to touch upon a condition in which violence has not disappeared, but has been absorbed into the environment as background, persisting through unstable traces.
Installation views of the current phase are from Dive into the Field, Tank Shanghai, Shanghai
Crater
Materials: 3D-printed photosensitive resin
130 × 150 × 40cm
During my fieldwork, I encountered many craters. Soil sampling and analysis from some of them showed that, compared to surrounding samples, the pollutant levels in certain crater soils were higher. Explosions not only alter the surface form; the high temperature and shock also continue to affect the recovery of soil conditions for a period of time.
I carried out on-site surveying of the contours of some craters and, based on these, made their negative-form models. For me, a crater is not merely a trace left by an explosion; it is more like a geomorphic structure jointly shaped by weapon parameters, explosive energy, and surface conditions. The negative form allows this space—formed through excavation, erasure, and compression—to be directly seen. It both presents how violence enters the ground and points to those that were damaged, disappeared, or cannot be restored in the explosion.
This crater negative form is suspended at the center of the exhibition space.
Farm tools
Materials: Shrapnel, basswood, nails
55 × 20 × 8cm
In old trenches, the remains of civilian houses, and farmland, I collected many fragments of shrapnel and forged them into a shovel and a hoe. Based on earlier soil analyses from selected contaminated areas, I worked with scientists to identify the pollutants present in several samples, and on this basis selected local plants with remediation potential, such as sunflowers. Using these two tools, I planted these species on a vacant plot, returning metal once used for war to the labor of restoring the land.
Hanger
Materials: Barbed wire, sunflower
Variable dimensions
A rusted strand of barbed wire found in a former conflict zone in Syria was turned by me into a hanger, imagining that soldiers, when putting on or taking off their camouflage uniforms, would feel the pull and the sting.
Installation views of the current phase are from Dive into the Field, Tank Shanghai, Shanghai.
This body of work does not emphasize the use of technical means to directly translate war pollution into clear information or visualized results, but instead enters into its already existing material traces. It attempts to show how war continues to act upon environments and living organisms in dispersed, delayed, and difficult-to-attribute ways. The consequences of war are not treated here as one-time events, but as an extended structure of time and space. These traces are not entirely invisible, yet they resist stable recognition and judgment. Scientific analysis provides the project with important partial assessments, while art operates within this unfinished condition, allowing consequences that are already present yet still difficult to identify to re-enter perception.
Planting
Photograph by Liu Shuai, Syria
On a suburban vacant lot north of Aleppo that had previously seen armed conflict, preliminary fieldwork and soil analyses indicated that concentrations of lead and cadmium were markedly elevated around blast craters. Drawing on existing research in phytoremediation, and in consultation with relevant specialists, I initiated a trial planting of a locally cultivated sunflower variety commonly grown by farmers in the area, placing them in the vicinity of the craters.
In 2025, a first batch of approximately fifty sunflowers was planted. This does not constitute remediation in an engineering sense, but rather a small-scale, in situ trial: to observe whether a common local crop can grow in areas with more concentrated contamination, and whether it may be capable of absorbing, immobilizing, or indicating the presence of lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals in the soil.
Over subsequent growing cycles, mature plants and the surrounding soil will be subjected to staged, repeated sampling and analysis. These results will be compared with the initial baseline data in order to observe the distribution and changes of lead and cadmium between plant and soil.
The roots, stems, leaves, and petals of these sunflowers will, following testing and appropriate safety handling, enter subsequent artistic work. In this way, the project not only brings material evidence of contamination from the site into exhibition contexts, but also attempts to return artistic practice to the affected ground itself: plants participate in the remediation trial while simultaneously becoming new forms of evidence and material, forming a cycle that moves from field research and pollution identification to artistic translation and back to the site.
The root of one sunflower has already been made into an experimental sound instrument, as an initial attempt within this approach, and will be further developed in a performance that continues this line of inquiry.
Petals from the first batch of mature sunflowers and leaves from a wild caper plant growing nearby;
an experimental sound instrument made from sunflower roots.
Over the past two years, regional conditions and site circumstances have continued to shift. Throughout this process, support and assistance from various individuals and institutions have enabled Camouflage Syndrome to continue.
During the Syria phase of the project, field research and sampling analysis were carried out under multiple constraints. Research on potentially toxic elements in the soils of north-west Syria conducted by Miassar Alhasan et al. (2023) provided an important background and point of comparison for the project.
I would like to thank the United Nations Mine Action Service for the professional exchange during the early-stage communication.
Part of the project’s technical support was provided by Guizhou MangShu Testing Technology Co., Ltd.
Special thanks to botanist Moe Abbas for his professional guidance and support.
