Faces fashioned out of used shoes, sculptures made of firewood, and animals carved from plastic are just some of the works of art created by several artists in the north-eastern province of Jilin.
The majority of their materials come from waste.
Li Jingkui, an artist in the city of Songyuan, creates beautiful images - foxes, monks and people in shapes of monkeys or pigs - all famous characters in China's literary classics, from a pair of used shoes.
Li recently exhibited his 20-plus masterpieces, with a special focus on his creation process. Crumpling an athletic shoe and covering it with an official hat made of shoe leather, he created a Beijing Opera mask of Cao Cao, a typical white-faced character famous for his crafts.
The inspiration to create characters from used shoes came to him 20 years ago when he saw a neighbor sporting a pair of sandals unintentionally depicting human heads. He "borrowed" them immediately and converted them to human faces after adding eyes and whiskers made of shoelaces.
The father of one of Li's colleagues collects garbage in his spare time, and Li often asks for worn shoes of various textures and shapes.
To date, Li has produced about 60 such works over the past 20 years.
Apart from Li's "shoe art- works," root sculptures created by Wang Yexing, a peasant in the city of Jiutai, impress people because they appear as if they were created naturally. His spouse revealed the secret that Wang's materials come mostly from firewood.
He often collects roots, even searching neighboring firewood piles. The neighbors believed him to be very thrifty at first upon seeing his bicycle loaded with firewood.
Indicating a root sculpture named "one-eyed Buddha," he noted that wood was once used to tie cattle and became shiny after years of friction, which, to him, appeared similar to a monk's bald head.
Wang turned the wood into a one-eyed monk snugged among swarms of snakes.
Using plastic instead of shoes and wood, the materials used by Xu Hongyan are found only in Xu's workshop.
When he started working in a local car-accessories factory in Changchun two years ago, Xu was intrigued by the various forms of plastic flowing from mixing machines. Inspired by the material, he picked up a knife and carved a horse out of the piece.
(Xinhua News Agency September 23, 2002)
