You've probably seen the pictures of monuments in Beijing hidden in a smoky haze and the city's inhabitants walking around with masks covering their faces.If that doesn't demonstrate the severity of China's environmental issues, maybe this will: A Beijing artist just built a brick of out the city's smog. A 34-year-old performance artist who calls himself Brother Nut reportedly spent four hours every day walking the city's streets with a 1,000-watt industrial vacuum cleaner. Using its nozzle, Brother Nut was able to collect dust from the air, though he was often mistaken for a "cleaner" or "air monitoring person."After 100 days of sucking smog out of the city's sky, he mixed the gray clump of dust he collected together with red clay. The end result was a brick.“Dust represents the side effects of humankind’s development, including smog and building-site dust,” he said in an interview on Tuesday, according to The New York Times . “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.”The project is extremely timely. On Tuesday, an “orange alert” in Beijing closed down city schools, according to the BBC . The alert was spurred by the highest reading of hazardous levels of air pollution in 13 months. Halfway around the world, China's president, Xi Jinping, joined other world leaders at the United Nations’ COP21 climate conference in Paris before heading to Zimbabwe for a state visit.