As a species with the power to imagine, we have a complicated relationship with the idea of disaster – of the apocalypse, of Armageddon. Of course we do not wish our own destruction, but we find it impossible not to envisage the event, to construct narratives around the end of the world: the skies turning black and the waters rising. Despite ourselves, we are drawn to images that visualise our inner fears and, more recently, our sense of guilt at the damage we know that we do to the planet.

Chinese-Australian installation artist, Shen Shaomin, works precisely within this psychological repertoire, his visions of a warped natural world tapping into anxieties about civilisation’s ghastly effects. His Unknown Creatures (2003) and Experimental Studio (2004) series consisted of sculptures made out of bone – bizarre and unsettling collections of fantastic animals created through errant biological mutation; while later his Bonsai Series (2007), exhibited at the Sydney Biennale in 2012, comprised of a range of miniature trees, tortured into shape with bolts and wire.

The Day After Tomorrow, Shen Shaomin’s first solo show in Australia in ten years, continued with this eerie aesthetic, expanding further on the themes of human brutality and its impact on a fragile environment. Showing at Gallery 4A between 15 November – 10 December 2011, the exhibition transformed the greater part of the gallery into a white crystalline world twinkling in darkness, evoking a vision of an unnatural reality hovering somewhere between the near future and present.

An exhibition called Cola Project doesn’t at first sound entirely new: Coca Cola, consumer culture, the power of advertising—these have all been considered before, not least of all by Chinese artists assessing the impact of global capitalism on traditional aesthetics and values.

This recent show at Gallery 4A in Sydney’s Chinatown, however, took a different perspective, and considered cola the sticky liquid rather than the clout of its global logo. After analysing the effects of consumerism on images, it appears that what you are left with is the object, and the ‘stuff’ of material culture.

Cola Project is currently the signature work of young, Beijing-based artist, He Xiangyu, and one that has been doing the international rounds since first showing in Beijing in 2010. 4A brought it to Sydney as part of their ongoing program to situate Australian art within the context of the Asia Pacific, bringing Asian exhibitions to Australia and recognising the Asian in Australian work. This, He Xiangyu’s third major art project, helps underscore this geographical and cultural proximity, if only for its acknowledgement of the finite—and increasingly crowded—nature of our physical world.

In October 2008, photographer Wang Jiuliang began a project investigating waste disposal in and around Beijing. Following the trucks that collected his daily rubbish, he discovered eleven large-scale refuse landfills scattered around the close suburbs of the city, each one growing daily alongside the skyscrapers, housing developments, and general urban boom that surrounded them.

Beyond this, Wang also uncovered an underground industry in which rubbish was being removed from the inner city and taken to hundreds of illegal dumpsites around the urban fringe. Here, people were making their homes and their living, building houses from discarded construction materials, wearing clothes they had gleaned in the trash, and making their dinners from the city’s food scraps. They raised pigs on leftover organic matter. Local shepherds brought sheep and cattle to graze between the bottles and plastic bags.

Shen Shaomin first came to acclaim in the 1900s with his Unknown Creatures and Experimental Fields series – sculptures of mythical creatures and bizarre biological scenarios made of bones. Since then, he has produced a diverse and large body of work, expressing both horror and fascination at the perversities of science, the brutality of humans against nature and the unsustainability of human civilisation.

Shen Shaomin migrated to Australia following the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Like many of his Chinese-Australian peers, however, he relocated to China a few years ago to take advantage of cheaper materials and studio space, and the dynamism of China’s international art scene. Shen maintains a connection with Australia, and is increasingly represented in Australian exhibitions. I spoke to him during a recent visit for the 17th Biennale of Sydney – images and interview below.