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               Ju Duoqi

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The Vegetable 

Museum

Paris-Beijing Photo gallery

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.

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Mona Tofu

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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.

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Napoleon On Potatos

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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.

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Van Gogh Made Of Leek

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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.

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Cabbage Monroe

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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.

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Liberty Leading The Vegetables

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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.

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Pickled Cucumber On The Volga

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The Anatomy Lesson Of Dr. Pickled Cabbage

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The Last Supper With The Gingermen

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