Aspundir: Vegetable Art By Ju Duoqi

Born in Chongqing in 1973, Ju Duoqi is Chinese artist who started working with vegetables in the summer of 2006. She spent two days peeling a few kilograms of peas, before stringing them on a wire and transforming them in a skirt, a top, a headdress and a magic wand. This was her first experience with vegetable art, and it was called Pea Beauty Pageant. In the years that followed, she created dozens of sculptures often pacing in front of vegetable stalls, deliberating on different vegetables as she mentally sketched her “paintings”.

Ju Duoqi spent a lot of her time going to the vegetable market, picking them up and placed them in different positions, to see which ones made them more interesting. She discovered the different colors and textures of vegetables offered a rich source of imagery. And frying, boiling, drying, pickling or letting them rot made them even more interesting. The artist realized she no longer needed models for her artworks, so using potatoes, onions, cabbage and other vegetables, Ju Duoqi recreates the world-famous paintings.