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.

An art project launched four years ago illustrated how scraps of DNA found in public could be turned into eerily lifelike composite sketches and three-dimensional models — now the police appear to be taking that technology in new (and potentially disturbing) direction.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg collected strands of hair, discarded cigarettes, chewing gum and other found materials and worked them into hauntingly realistic masks as part of Stranger Visions in 2012. But her resulting sculptures were at best approximate — DNA can only tell you so much about what a person looks like. Such limitations are not stopping law enforcement agencies, however, from pushing the limits of the technology.

Companies like Parabon NanoLabs that specialize in DNA phenotyping, however, are working with the Department of Defense and other agencies to use similar approaches. Their Snapshot technology references databases that pair genetic information with physical traits. Agencies can thus send in DNA and get back a genetic profile or even a composite sketch.

Used as a means of eliminating suspects from the pool or identifying remains, this technology could be fine. However, since it can’t tell weight, age and other features (even race can be ambiguous), it is also possible that such renderings would mislead investigators — or worse: influence trials in the wrong direction. Photo-realistic images and models have a way of skewing the perceptions of the observer — once seen they are hard to unsee.

“Ancestry becomes a sort of short-cut term for race,” Dewey-Hagborg worries. “When it’s a person reading their own genealogical information, they’re going to look at that in light of what they know about their own personal history. But when it gets into the hands of the police, that all gets thrown out the window, because there is no self-knowing subject there.” Advocates of the technology point out that these is not how they intend it to be used — but still, in comparing it to data gathered from eyewitness accounts or surveillance cameras, they risk going in that direction anyway.

More from the artist about Stranger Visions: she “creates portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to the developing technology of forensic DNA phenotyping and the potential for a culture of biological surveillance. Designed as an exploratory project based on emerging science, the forecast of Stranger Visions has proved prescient.”

Finding new life as a combination of retail and housing space, this stunning structure’s new look works with the existing building envelope and floor plates while breaking down visible divisions between stories.

Located in Bangkok, Thailand, the refab is now home to four siblings above and their family-run jewelry store on the first floor.

Idin Architects (photos by Spaceshift) kept the framework, difficult to remove as it touches adjacent structures, but renovated the interior and added an entirely new facade that seems to defy floors as it wraps up the front.

Each family occupies two stories of the 7-floor building, with elevators connecting all of the different units in the back and an enclosed rooftop patio above.

A central lightwell (occupied in part by a slow-growing tree) and other internal features reconnect the different are as well while maintaining separation and privacy for each family unit.

Light painter Diliz has worked for three years to twist, turn and perfect his single-line sparkler sketches in urban settings around the world. Each successive shot is related to a new time and place but also reflects a fresh attempt at capturing a mood and creating a sense of site-specific interaction.

Diliz (aka Vincent Delesvaux) has experimented with all kinds of photographic light art. In this particular series, dubbed 60 Seconds to Find an Exit, he set up shop at night in out-of-the-way streets and alleys, abandoned buildings and deserted basements.

His travels took him everywhere from European locations (including Verbier, Switzerland and Grenoble, France) all the way to cities in China, such as Lijiang, Yangshuo Fenghuang and Shanghai.

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Long Exposure Faces Moody Light Art Painted With Sparks

Move over, Facebook. A hybrid celebration of the written word, printed page, physical sculpture and possibilities of cutting-edge technologies, these conceptual creations breath new life into old volumes.

Featured in full three-dimensional form, with internal text conforming to exterior shape, are Anne Frank, Vincent van Gosh, Louis van Gaal and Kader Abdolah, designed to promote regional literature in the Netherlands.

Each page is only a little different from the last, but as those changes propagate, a shape is revealed – while only concepts illustrated to celebrate reading, one has to wonder what it would be like to pick one up and flip through the pages.

From Van Wanten Etcetera in Amsterdam (with artwork by Souverein): “Each year CPNB (Collective Promotion [of] Dutch Literature) organizzes the Dutch Book Week to promote Dutch literature. And every year a specific genre is being profiled. This year the (auto) biography is featured. This is translated in the theme ‘Geschreven Portretten’, which translates in ‘Written Portraits’. “