Artists create massive sculpture made from thousands of eyeglass lenses

If you happen to be in Turkey right now, don't forget to drop by the famous Pera Museum. Aside from its wondrous Ottoman artworks, you will be delighted to see a vast sculpture fashioned from thousands of used eyeglass lenses.

The nine-meter wide kinetic installation, titled sea/see/saw, hangs in the front of the historic building in Istanbul. It was created by Canadian artists Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett using 14,000 lenses from discarded eyewear. The two were looking for something translucent so that it wouldn't cover up the museum facade, and came up with the idea of using eyeglasses to create pixilated ripples across the front of the building, as drawn by the wind.

The shimmering sculpture, which is on display until January next year, has been designed to mimic the way the light dances on the surface of the Golden Horn, the major urban waterway and the primary inlet of the Bosphorus in the city.

"It has a really sort of delicate, elegant quality that we weren't necessarily intending but we're quite pleased with, and we had a few people ask us if it was made of Swarovski crystals as when you're at ground level it takes a minute to realize what the material is," says Garrett.

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Preserved tattoos of the dead

The idea of preserving tattoos after death came into existence long before NAPSA . London's Wellcome Collection has over 300 specimens of preserved human flesh bearing tattoos , collected in the late 19th century. There are many more examples of smaller collections in Paris, Poland, Portugal, Berlin, and Austria. But what fascinates me the most is this lesser-known museum at Tokyo University, the Medical Pathology Museum, which houses pieces of skin collected since 1926 by Dr. Masaichi Fukushi. "Fukushi would perform autopsies on donated cadavers and dissect off just the skin. He created a method of treatment to preserve the skin and kept them stretched in a glass frame, essentially like a leather. Later the ownership of the tattooed skin collection was passed on to Fukushi's son Katsunari. Katsunari added a further 20 tattooed skins himself and it's believed that the Medical Pathology Museum has 105 in its collection, many with full body suits." ...

Firefly-themed park opens in China

Observing fireflies at night can be engrossing. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to catch a few of these flickering lightning bugs and put them inside a glass jar. If you're a firefly enthusiast and you're thinking of planning a trip around Asia, you might want to consider China. According to this blog , the world's first ever firefly-themed park just opened in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province. It is divided up into five separate areas including a zero-distance contact zone, observation zone, flying zone, breeding zone and science popularization area for visitors to interact with and observe the insects. The park has already attracted thousands of visitors, and will be opened annually from the end of May to early October.

Jared Yokte's surreal paintings

I found some really strange creatures today, and they all come from Filipino artist Jared Yokte . His characters are grotesque yet intriguing that instead of looking away you want to peer closer. His renditions of human and animal figures, as described by artist critic Cid Reyes, are marked by "intricate, flowing striations of lines, like exposed musculature or twisting ropy old twine." Jared's oil paintings are mostly autobiographical in narrative and interrelated with one another. Although you might not hear the cries and howls of his dusky, ethereal characters, you can certainly feel their misery. Jared was born in Davao Oriental, but now lives and works in Tarlac. His At the Rear There Is Something Contrary is now on view at Blanc Gallery in Quezon City.

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