In this photograph, Bai Yiluo arranged dead flies to mimic cao shu (grass script), a refined and highly expressive cursive style of Chinese calligraphy. From 1958 to 1962, Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976), the head of the Chinese Communist Party and the leader of the People’s Republic of China, implemented the Four Pests Campaign to improve public health and food production. This policy urged people to kill the carriers of disease: houseflies for spreading typhoid, rats for carrying plague, mosquitoes for transmitting malaria, and sparrows for harming crops. However, the eradication of millions of sparrows disrupted the ecosystem, allowing natural predators like locusts to devastate crops and contribute to widespread famine. Yiluo’s use of fly corpses here may serve as an indictment of this history, while the illusion of refined calligraphy challenges us to reconsider traditional Chinese artistic conventions.