Toilet Bowl Waterfall in Foshan, China

Foshan, a city in central Guangdong province in China, has one of the strangest public art - a fountain built out of 10,000 recycled toilets, sinks and urinals covering a wall 100 meters long and almost 5 meters high. The fountain/waterfall was originally designed for the 2009 Foshan Pottery and Porcelain Festival, a porcelain product tradeshow, before being installed as a permanent piece of public art. It is just one of the many impressive ceramic sculptures residing in Shiwan Park.

The “art piece” was created by Chinese artist Shu Yong, who along with his team, spent 2 months installing the toilets. The toilets are a mixture of unwanted factory seconds and ones donated by foreigners and locals. All the toilets and urinals are actually connected to a tap so that they could be flushed. The installation is flooded periodically, creating a cascading waterfall to the amusement of the onlookers.

Photo credit: China Daily/Reuters

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Sources: 1800recycling, Universia

Crazy Japanese Inventions

I guess the word Japanese in the title is redundant. You can’t expect any of these contraptions to come from anybody else.

(Somebody please translate the sign)

Only in China

German photographer Bernd Hagemann has long been fascinated by China and its people, particularly the way they slept at every street corner and in the strangest positions and situations. Some even snore in deep slumber. Bernd began photographing and putting them on his website Sleeping Chinese. Since 2002, he was snapped over 700 photographs of Chinese sleeping in seemingly impossible positions: under trucks, on shopping carts, scooters and butcher slabs, vividly illustrating the millions of weary masses who help power the nation.

Bernd puts all sleepers into one of the three categories – hard sleepers, soft sleepers and group sleepers. Hard sleepers are able to fall asleep anywhere on any surface, soft sleepers need something a little more comfortable, and group sleepers sleep with people around them, be it friends, family or complete strangers.

Napoleon once warned. "Let China sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world”. But Bernd says that he started his site to show the outside world the less threatening side of China’s rise. “They talk about ‘The Sleeping Giant.’ About ‘The Birth of the New Super Power’ or ‘The Awakening of the Red Dragon.’ Often with a strange kind of undertone, which is supposed to frighten us. The reality definitely looks more peaceful,” he wrote.

Also See: Life in the Metro