For centuries, Chinese artists have developed their techniques and styles under the tutelage of a mentor, emulating the finest details of the creative process step-by-step.
At the point a copied work becomes indistinguishable from an original, the artist attains the status of a master.
The Vegetable Museum by Ju Duoqi puts a new twist on the old Chinese copycat culture.
Using digital manipulation, Ju recreates canonized Western paintings entirely out of marketplace vegetables; the result is a revelation of absurdity - pure digital noir.
Ju's stylized carrots garnished with a sweet potato head offer fresh insight into Edvard Munch's The Scream. Likewise, the fantasy and imagination of The Birthday is arguably surpassed with cayenne pepper, soybeans, and garlic skin.
In her Death of Cabbage Head, the assassinated martyr's note commemorates fallen comrade revolutionaries, such as The Mashed Potato, The Sweet Potato in Toffee, and The French Fries, echoing David's original with starchy, tasteful humor.
Recognizing that "art can be difficult to read", Ju assumes the mindset of a housewife to present "an environmental way of bringing work and life together... using a woman's most effortless and thrifty method of fantasizing about the larger world".
Perhaps Ju is combining a housewife's sense of whimsy with an artist's sense of timelessness, as David himself summarized The Death of Marat as "a perfect mirror of its time - on the other hand, a work that any Antique viewer could have taken as a product of his own age".
10 am-5 pm, through Jan 22 at Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery, 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang district, 5978-9262/3
(China Daily January 4, 2009)
