Ju Douqi’s Vegetable Museum subverts its subjects in a manner so overtly playful that it is easy to overlook the powerfully encoded message. Ju’s photographs, which are packed with intense color, are bold re-creations of world-famous paintings ... with a vegetal twist.

Images we instantly recognise, such as Warhol’s riff on Marilyn Monroe, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Picasso’s The Dream are sliced, diced and pickled into vegetable-based collages. Venus, in Ju’s world, is a radish, whilst Monroe is cabbage and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is given a new bean-based identity. In more grotesque instances of reproduction, Ju substitutes blood for ketchup and mis-shapen pickled cabbages for Rembrandt’s doctors. Munch’s “The Scream” is a howling face that displays the profound despair of an elongated sweet potato.

Vegetable Museum is easy to dismiss as a crass display of headline-grabbing art made for dubmed-down consumption. The colors are flashy, and masterpieces are reduced to heads of cabbage and sticks of celery. It might be easy to shake your head in consternation until you acquiesce to the notion that this collage is precisely that: a medley of food that forms a complete whole.

The artist’s process—which includes gathering, preparing, assembling, cooking and eating her own pieces—articulates the magic of food: it isn’t permanent, it rots, yet it is the fundamental building block of life.

Ju’s photographs bring the food pyramid of life back down to earth. It’s a cryptic statement on the empowerment of disregarded or forgotten people the world over.

Emilia Fuller