Sometimes it’s best to let artists speak for themselves, and their work. Today is such an occasion thanks to the amazing detail and honesty provided by Ju Duoqi, who describes how her work came to be as follows.  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. The yam soldiers, with their bewildering little round eyes raise a cabbage banner. Having figured out what moving forward means, have they lost their momentum? Each of the potato-head soldiers has a different expression, not sure of their bearing, perhaps surprised, but that is definitely a completely unadorned potato. You wouldn’t know them any better if they were chopped into French fries and covered in ketchup, but when placed in the picture, they all appear unfamiliar and rich in facial expression. On the ground lies the body of a winter melon soldier, with rotting ketchup flowing out of his body like blood. The battleground is strewn with rotting vegetable leaves. This great story of history, this world-famous painting, here becomes completely absurd. How do you approach this famous painting, do you really know its historical background? Do you know what meaning the painter wished to convey? I believe that the world is the world as I understand it, and none other.
I am happy that I have found a way of life for women who love the home. I have found an environmental way of bringing work and life together. From imagination to reconstruction and postproduction, it burns through tons of boring hours. A housewife, who doesn’t have to get up in the morning, wakes up at two a.m. to fry up the carrot that just served as Napoleon’s head. As a medium that decodes time, photography is my favorite. Everything has a spirit, each vegetable, each person, and each second, under careful observation, has extraordinary meaning. What makes me happy is that when I see Napoleon on his Potato, I can think back to when I fried him up and ate him at two in the morning in the summer of ’08. Through photographs, memory becomes sentiment. I never leave the house, and when I do I rarely travel more than 15 kilometers. In a studio, with a knife, a box of toothpicks and some vegetables, I can make small sculptures and slap together big scenes, using a woman’s most effortless and thrifty method of fantasizing about the larger world.

Who doesn’t know the joys of Mario Kart. Just when you thought you lost the race, you get the iconic flying blue shell on your last lap, throwing the leader off of his race, and giving you one last chance at glory. It’s too bad shrinking lightning bolts, invincible stars, speed-ups and banana peels aren’t real life objects we can use during our daily commute. How awesome would that be?  If you live in Portland, Oregon, you need not dream anymore, as you can get your Mario Kart on while using city bike lanes. Some anonymous joker has used clever stencils to re-create various power-ups and tokens on bike lanes.  At the very least, it makes the daily commute a bit of a game.  Just remember, if you hit other vehicles in this game, it might leave a mark.

Via Fecal Face: Richard Colman was born in 1976 and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Colman graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, in 2002. He has exhibited extensively throughout the world in solo and group exhibitions including Krets, Malmo Sweeden, V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, Union Gallery, London, UK and ARKEN Museum Of Modern Art, Denmark. In 2006, Gingko Press released a book cataloging his work titled “I Was Just Leaving.” Colman currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.
Colman was recently interviewed as a part of Fecal Face’s 10 Year anniversary.  The questions and answers are admittedly not as lengthy as we would have hoped, but sometimes it’s all about quality, not quantity.  Case in point is our favorite question and answer.  Fecal Face asked Colman what you thought that 2010 would be like back in 2000?  He answered:

Flying cars and food in pill form.

Be sure to check out the entire interview, and a variety of others helping Fecal Face turn 10!

Critical Mass is a sculptural installation by UK-based artist Antony Gormley made up of 60 life-size cast iron body forms and is displayed on the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, United Kingdom. The installation is made up of five casts from 12 discrete moulds of Gormley’s body, ranging from a low crouching position to squatting, sitting, kneeling and standing – an ascent of man ranging through the complex syntax of the body. Critical Mass will be on display until september 26, 2010.

Via Inhabitat: In the sought-after London boroughs of Chelsea and Islington, inner city birds often have to claim their nesting space quickly! However, birds that are open to changing their wild ways might be convinced to try out the innovative bird-housing concept developed by the artists at London Fieldworks. The “Spontaneous City in the Tree of Heaven” opened recently as part of the Secret Garden Project by UP Projects and hopes to develop into a haven of biodiversity and create a new public awareness of the ecological and cultural value of urban green spaces.
With over 250 bird and bug boxes available in the stunning sculptural art installation, birds can choose from a range of shapes and sizes of boxes to use for shelter, nesting or feeding spaces. The diverse complex of bird boxes were designed to reflect the architecture in the nearby Georgian terraces and 1960s flats that surround the park in Duncan Terrace Gardens and Cremorne Gardens. We love the strangely organic forms that are created by stacking these distinct modular box shapes together and are happy to hear that they have been woven together using elastic bands, which means the structure can change over time as the tree grows.

Ribbonesia is the art project which artist and illustrator, BAKU Maeda has been working on. As an artists, BAKU has been using brus and pen as an extension of his hands and imagination. Last couple of years, he found more interest in the way of expression in 3 dimensional and sculptural ways by using ribbon and other fabric materials. He has been always obsessed in varieties of animals and its expressions and habits since his early ages. His obsession towards animals becomes his major motif of his daily creation.
Recently, he is working with many colors of ribbon and creating various animals expression. This simple repetition of twist and bend sublime such rich expression of animals and it often captures the essence of life. Every animal is delicately made by hand. Colours are carefully chosen, so none of the animals are the same. They are all different and special. Far from regular wrapping usage, BAKU made his own world, that full of life and joy.