Revival Ramp

In the central, curving section of this image, Chin illustrates his iconic Revival Field, a work of Land Art begun in 1991, in which he planted hyperaccumulators to revive a landfill in Minnesota contaminated with heavy metals and incinerated sewage waste. The vignette on the lower left reproduces Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing A Copse of Trees (ca. 1500). Moving up the ramp and forward in time, Chin depicts the advent of farming and the impacts of the Industrial Revolution, as factory pollution clouds the air and dyes a river black.

The curving ramp leads up to a further vignette in which the stream splits into three distinct directions: an apocalypse under a black sun, a ravaged landscape of dead trees, and a thriving ecosystem—its river purified of metals and da Vinci’s trees revived.