Covered

The National Health Commission of the PRC (formerly the Ministry of Health of the PRC) organized experts to revise the China Health Cities (CHC) Standards in June 2010, raising the selection criteria for some aspects of urban environmental sanitation and environmental protection. Local governments across the country were taking various measures to improve the urban environment to win the CHC title, while "visual greening" is also becoming popular.

All along, buildings and bare land under construction covering with dustproof nets, and the government did not require the color of the nets. The actual effect of the dustproof net is feeble, easy to loosen, and broken, and its plastic material is not degradable. Large-scale use, long-time covering, and the various recycling costs higher than re-purchasing made it a significant source of soil microplastic pollution.

Since that time, however, green dustproof screens have gradually taken over all construction sites. The reason for the popularity of this much-defects material seems to have nothing to do with its contribution to environmental protection but instead, its green color, which excels at achieving political goals on a low-cost budget —— confusing the green area of the city detected by satellites and increasing the greening rate to meet CHC Standards. According to the China Environment News, despite current enhancements in satellite resolution, it is still challenging to identify this camouflage through satellite images. The truth about the ecology, the land, and the city is thus covered under the green dustproof nets. This green plastic which is supposed to be a foreign object to the ecosystem, thus logically enters people's lives and becomes a more than reasonable landscape. A sort of social discipline is internalized in the logic of the construction team's application of this material and people's automatic acceptance of visual greening without cognition.

In Covered, a humanoid creature wearing a green dustproof net wanders through the urban and natural environment. Finally, one night, it disappeared into an urban green belt.