Li Hongbo, a Chinese artist based in Beijing, has a pretty incredible exhibit on display in New York City this month.
The former book editor is still working with paper but has taken on a whole new craft.
At the Klein Sun Gallery, Li has glued and shaped thousands of sheets together to form sculptures unlike any other.
He's created everything from enormous blobs he accordions into shapes to more precise forms.
"I discovered the flexible nature of paper through Chinese paper toys and paper lanterns," Li, 38, told Reuters. "Later, I used this principle to make a gun casually inverting a crude paper pistol into an elegant fan. A gun is solid, used for killing, but I turned it into a tool for play or decoration. In this way, it lost both the form of a gun and the culture inherent to a gun. It became a game."
Most recently, he has been sculpting paper into busts. The videos of some below make them appear to be marble, but their true nature is identifiable when the paper creating the faces is allowed to part. Each head requires more than 5,000 layers which are then cut and sanded as if they were solid blocks, according to Reuters.
Li is also a student of his craft and has always loved its history. Beyond his sculptures, he has spent six years producing a collection of books recording more than 1,000 years of Buddhist art on paper, which was invented by the Chinese.
The busts, which are on display at the Klein Sun Gallery, have received some mixed reactions.
"Strange and unsettling are just adjectives used by some individuals," Li said. "People have a fixed understanding of what a human is ... So when you transform a person, people will reconsider the nature of objects and the motivation behind the creation. This is what I care about."
But for the most part, people are awed by Li's work.
"The only way these sculptures could get any cooler is if someone shot a slow-motion, ultra HD video - oh wait, somebody has? Awesome. Enjoy," wrote Timothy McGrath at Global Post.
