ANYONE FOR da Vinci's Mona Lisafrom Chinese cabbage, kelp, celery, tofu, pepper and potatoes? Or a Last Supperlovingly rendered using ginger, radish, tomato, shiitake mushrooms, bean curd, seaweed and rapeseed?
Chinese artist Ju Duoqi is taking the sensual side of food to its extreme - by recreating the work of Old Masters out of vegetables, and photographing the results.
Once the photographs are taken, Ju then fries up the art for dinner with her mates.
It's intriguing to look at her version of Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the Peoplewhich she has called, naturally enough, Liberty Leading the Vegetables, and imagine it making its way into a rice bowl afterwards, but this is part of the environmentally friendly message of the pieces.
"I have narrowed my works down to where I only use recycled materials in my surroundings. So it's easy for me to come up with the idea of making artworks with food, which is cheap and environmentally friendly," said Ju, whose exhibition, The Vegetable Museum, has just opened at the Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery at the 798 art district in the Chinese capital.
Before the vegetable subjects are pinned together to make the cabbage collages, she boils or dries the contents, or uses preserved vegetables.
The market for Chinese contemporary art has gone off a bit because of the global economic crisis, but it is still performing well, and Ju's work is selling steadily. Among good sellers were Cabbage Monroe- a vegetable version of Andy Warhol's 1967 pop-art Marilyn Monroe.
The exhibition combines many different Chinese interests and obsessions. Food is central to everything in China, where an extremely common greeting is "Have you eaten?"
It also addresses serious themes about the environment and recycling, such as air and water pollution, which cause such big problems here.
It's also popular in Chinese art - a few years ago one of China's leading conceptual artists walked everywhere with a lettuce on a leash.
Ju said she began working on vegetable art in 2006 when she started making skirts, necklaces, headdresses and magic wands out of peas, before photographing herself wearing the results.
The show, which also features her take on Gustav Klimt's The Kissand a particularly hilarious parody of Munch's The Scream, is another example of Chinese artists breaking through and becoming more important.
"The Chinese are the most international artists now. There were zero Chinese artists 20 years ago, now they are having solo shows in every big city. It's about the individuals, not the scene," said Jerome Sans, creative director of the Ullens Centre for the Contemporary Arts in the 798 district. Ju told the Guangzhou Dailynewspaper that very often the taste of the vegetables used in the pictures is meant to suggest the shape or spirit of the subject of the work. The bitter taste of Beijing's favourite cucumber sauce is meant to suggest sweat in her rendition of Ilya Repin's The Volga Boatmen.
Born in Chongqing in 1975, Ju, who is a graduate of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, has designed websites and computer games as well as working on her vegetable paintings.
"Using vegetables to reproduce these works is a lot of fun. I think there are a number of areas worth pondering. Don't you think?" she said. Each piece in the show took a month to complete, including retouching the content.
She has used a small wooden barrel in her work to recreate the taste of Hunan cuisine's barrel rice.
"The whole process is a lot of fun: imagining using a potato to be a soldier's face, rotten tomatoes to be blood. Fantasy is fun," she added.