From The Vegetable Museum: The art of Ju Duoqi:
Ju Duoqi:
In the summer of “™06, I bought several kilograms of peas, and sat there quietly for two days peeling them, before stringing them on a wire and turning them into a skirt, a top, a headdress and a magic wand. I used a remote control to take a photo of myself in them, and named it Pea Beauty Pageant. That was my first work of vegetable art.
In the two years that followed, I often dressed up as a housewife, leisurely strolling to the market in a serious search for fun. I would often pace in front of the vegetable stalls, picking things up, thinking and putting them back, trying to figure out which positions made them more interesting.
The different types, shapes and colors of the vegetables, with a bit of rearranging, can make for a rich source of imagery.
Fresh, withered, rotting, dried, pickled, boiled, fried, they all come out different.
I no longer needed a model, as they all became actors and even props.
As a director, I directed them to restage La Liberté Guidant le Peuple, and called it La Liberté Guidant les Légumes. As a Chinese woman in this internet age, what I present to people is this kind of world famous painting. Against that fiery fried-egg backdrop, this woman who emanates onion smells from her breast and carries a spring onion spear in her left hand and a wood ear flag in her right, draped in a tofu skin robe, leads the vegetable people forward. Read and see more here.
And check out her fantasies of Chinese cabbage here.
via amusingplanet