If you really want to talk about culture, you will end up with nothing" - no one will be interested, says artist Ricardo Arena, whose exhibition "Four Times a Tree" is underway at Shanghai's 1918 Art Space.

The Italian artist from Milan is showing intriguing, playful works based on his three visits to Shanghai over the past two years. He says they're not profound, not even meaningful, just interesting images.

The show features eight computer-graphic prints, five collage works and one video. They depict scenes straight out of science fiction - Shanghai's ring roads overgrown with strange plants.

The humorous artist has given long, strange and meaningless titles to his works, and to the exhibition itself. For example, "He Communicated His Intentions through the Mutation of the Carbon-14 Radiation Lying within the Tree's Rings" is the title of a river scene image.

He explains how he got the idea. During his first visit in Shanghai, he saw vessels on the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek loaded with sand and stone materials. Then he added more and more ships on the river, carrying huge cargoes. The ships themselves disappear under "mountains" and "hills" of stone, wood and sand floating and moving on the water surface.

He developed his ideas during his second visit to Shanghai, shooting a lot of photos that he later worked on when he was back home.

In early May, he visited Shanghai a third time to complete his works. The floating-mountains-on-rivers scenes are turned into a video that is projected on a wall.

The video opens with a normal scene on the Huangpu River where ships are carrying stone and sand. Gradually there are more and more ships and the cargoes get bigger and bigger. Later, viewers cannot see ships or the river; instead, they see huge strange trees, lotus, snow-capped mountains and many other natural objects moving by themselves.