Seamlessly connecting realistic facial features with organic architecture, these sculptural works bridge reality and fantasy, natural forms and built scenes blurring scales and dimensions.

Artist Yuanxing Liang, a graduate of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts,deftly connects heads and landscapes — the latter populated with ponds, trees and bridges — in wraparound works.

One of these, Peach Blossom Island (above), was created for the Wonder Festival in Shanghai. It was inspired by the fable of Peach Blossom Dragon Spring, a phantom-dreaming world equally surreal in legend as in the sculpture.

Many of the elements in these works transition with remarkable clarity from human to architectural forms, with windswept hair morphing into tree branches or vegetation-covered hillsides, or crumbling faces breaking into rocky facades. The effect brings the viewer inside the mind of the figure, making it easy to imagine they are lost in thought in the landscapes spilling out all around them.

What’s on the menu at these abandoned chinese restaurants? Stereotypical architecture and signs displaying near-racist “oriental” fonts, for starters.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to play the race card – countless structures in the orient are more flamboyantly exaggerated than the worst of these over-the-top chinese restaurants. Besides, show us an “ethnic” eatery that DOESN’T lay on the “culture” with a trowel: setting the mood for a foreign-style feast means ya gotta go there.

That said, chinese restaurants have a tradition of going the extra mile when it comes to cultural embellishment. Take the Floating Restaurant Sea Palace in Gothenburg, Sweden. Moored at the Gullbergskajen docks since 2002, the dragon-headed (and tailed) restaurant soon went bankrupt and was abandoned by its owners.

After becoming a hangout for homeless people, the City complained and forced the owner, John Wang, to relocate the barge to the comparatively inaccessible Gullbergsvass marsh. Wang states he intends to repair and relaunch the restaurant but as of May 2013, no action had been taken.

Oh Man…

The good news is that this visually wrong-on-many-levels chinese restaurant in east London, UK is abandoned. The bad news is, nobody thought to remove – or at least cover – that distressing sign. OK, we get it, it was “the olden days” (note “Peking”) and nobody batted an eyelash but puh-lease… we expected better of you, Hackney. Flickr user Fat Les (bellaphon) snapped the offensive ex-eatery on March 17th of 2010 while runABC posted an artistically decorated version that ignored that glaring eyesore of a sign.

No JOY in Dublin

Flickr user William Murphy (infomatique) snapped the abandoned JOY Oriental Take Away restaurant on January 30th of 2010, then again a year later, and returned for yet another shot in July of 2011. It would seem restaurant turnaround in Dublin, Ireland isn’t exactly brisk. What a Seamus.

Remember the Mein

Who can say when the above uber-decrepit Sun Sun Chow Mein restaurant on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in NYC’s Harlem closed… can anyone living even recall eating there? In any case, Flickr user Margie & James snapped this warts-and-all photo of the abandoned business way back in 2001 – it was demolished sometime after 2004.

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Modified inline skates holding pots of black pigment allow this artist to create her huge works (up to 40 feet or more) while rolling around the room, with results that look remarkably like smaller-scale works of hand-drawn calligraphy.

A student at the California College of art, Tian Haisu has dubbed her approach Landskating. She notes that her “whole body is involved” in this unusual process, filling her creations with a unique kind of “power, speed and rhythm.”

Her works feature landscapes, plants and architecture, all created by pressing down on giant unrolled sheets of paper deployed after she has sketched out and thought through these larger compositions on small sheets.

As with any artistic approach, it took the artist time to learn the medium, executing with her feet rather than her hands in a way that both liberates the creative process but also involves complexities and stylistic impacts that are not always easy to predict or control.

In his most voluminous undertaking to date, this book artist bids farewell to the long legacy of printed Encyclopedia Britannica sets with a mountainous tribute to their 244 years of history.

Guy Laramée, book artist and author of this piece titled Adieu (French for goodbye), has done similar works at smaller scale, sometimes carved into single books and other times made from whole sets or entire series. A range of fascinating examples can be seen below and certain pieces are available for purchase from the Foster/White Gallery.

The act of gouging into a book seems almost violent, making the idyllic and often nature-centric compositions this artist creates via that destruction seem strikingly peaceful by contrast.

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Encyclopedic Landscape Artist Carves 24 Volume Book Set