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.

Inspired by planned Super Sewer that will reduce pollution in London’s central waterway by 96%, this audacious design aims to take advantage of a future in which it is finally safe again to swim in the River Thames. Unlike a similar proposal for New York City’s Hudson River (more on that below), this bold plan proposes to use unfiltered river water to fill its swimming holes.

Studio Octopi and their partners at Civic Engineers and Jonathan Cook Landscape Architects ask doubters to imagine the experience of clean swimming right in the heart of the city, with incredible urban views framed by rich regional plant life.

One fixed-in-place pool would be replenished each time the surrounding tides rise over its high water mark (like coastal rock pools). The other would itself lift and lower, floating up and down with the river’s natural highs and lows, thus providing swimmers with a sense of the currents but within a protected space.

More on the project’s context: “In 1865, Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s London sewage system was opened. 150 years later the sewers are at the limits of their capacity. In 2012, 57 combined sewer overflows discharged 39 million tonnes of sewage into the River Thames. Thames Water is planning the Thames Tideway Tunnel, or ‘Super Sewer’, for completion in 2023.”

Meanwhile, across the pond in New York, the Plus Pool reached its crowdfunding goal some time ago but is a long way from completion. Though both propose to use water from the rivers they are set in, this one, unlike its British brethren, assumes filters will be essential.

The design is also somewhat more contemporary – the plus shape is clean, modern and separates the pool into four primary zones for different use cases.

Whether either proposal will be realized remains to be seen, but one thing they may have in common: selling the public has already proven easier than pushing their respective cities into accepting the plans and taking action on them.