Our Bodies, Ourselves

Mack told me about this new artist who was preserving bodies and dissecting them in interesting poses forever ago, so when I saw a "Bodies: The Exhibition" ad cruise past on the top of a taxi, it was immediately added to the To Do list. It turns out that this new artist is actually a team of noted dissectors in China, but that didn't detract from the sick desire to see what's really inside all of us.

We paid entirely too much for our tickets and then took a trip through all the systems of the body. At first, it was kind of gross to see people standing there with yellow toenails, eyebrows, smiles and no skin, but it quickly became fascinating.










It was cool to see muscles splayed open like pinwheels to reveal metal rods and artificial joints. It was amazing to see a brain and try to imagine how that traceless mass of playdough controls everything we do. It was strange to see how our bodies look from a cross-section perspective. It was interesting that most of the bodies that were on display were men and looked Asian, as much as a skinless face with lips and eyebrows can look like any particular ethnicity.
Apparently there is a pregnant woman on display at some of the exhibitions, but she wasn't at ours. I can't imagine what that would have been like to see. Or imagine how her family came to the conclusion to donate her body, with fetus still therein, to this project.

My favorite part of the exhibit was the blood vessels. They have some process where they inject the circulatory system with these different colored polymers, and it makes the most stunning, colorful sculptures. They reminded me of coral reefs, little lung coral reefs and heart coral reefs and brain coral reefs -- evidence of beauty way beneath the skin's surface.