Beijing has been seeing tough days, with a beige-gray miasma of smog, making hospitals packed with people complaining about respiratory issues. The residents hoped that the city was over the worst of its chronic pollution, but it doesn’t seem so.

But a performance artist ‘Brother Nut’ has something solid to show from the acrid soup in the air. It is a brick of condensed pollution.

The artist dragged a roaring, industrial-strength vacuum cleaner around the Chinese capital’s landmarks for around 100 days, taking in dust from the air.

He mixed the collected gray substance with red clay for creating a tiny but potent symbol of the air problems in the city.

In an interview on Tuesday, he explained, “Dust represents the side effects of humankind’s development, including smog and building-site dust. When I first arrived in Beijing, I wore a hygienic mask for a few days, but later I stopped. In smog like this, there’s no escaping”.

His ‘Project Dust’ reports in the Chinese media have come along with the worst smog in over a year throughout northern China. The reports have made Brother Nut, whose actual name is Wang Renzheng, instantly famous in the city.

One of over 4,000 often-rueful comments on an online photo gallery of Brother Nut’s project read ‘Roughly everybody in Beijing would have a brick in their stomachs, older people, maybe five’.

The smog wave made an entry across northern China on Monday, shortly prior to the start of negotiations in Paris.