You've got foetus on your breath
Why kill time when you can kill yourself
You've got some foetus on your breath, baby
   --Scraping Foetus off the Wheel

The man pictured apparently eating a small roast baby in our previous story turns out to be an 'artist' named Zhu Yu, who performed a conceptual piece called "Eating People" at a Shanghai arts festival last year.

Additional pics like this one are available on the Chinese-Art Web site, along with an artsy-fartsy explanation of how transcendently brilliant it all is.

This raises the possibility that the child pictured is an actual dead baby. Conceptualists typically go for maximum authenticity in their work, being a lot of anything-for-a-buck illiterate knuckleheads oblivious to the glaring contradiction between 'authenticity' and 'art' evident to those of us who can, like, read books and sit exams and such.

Whether because he, like most artists, can't afford actual groceries, or whether in an effort to make some profound statement, the likelihood exists that 'Foetus Breath Zhu' is actually committing the crime of eating long pig with -- it's almost too horrible to write -- orange juice.

The piece may be a ham-handed reference to China's countless famines, a continual menace for millennia. The most recent, well within the memory of today's Chinese, occurred in 1962 and claimed 30 million souls.

Or it could be a reference to Chinese cannibalism as recounted in the book Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China by I Cheng, who believes the insanity of the Cultural Revolution manifest itself in widespread communal munch-outs.

Still, there's no reason to imagine that a crime other than incredibly bad beverage judgment has been committed, as there is a common and often fatal infantile disease rampant in China known as 'being a baby girl'. Zhu may simply have obtained a victim of this dreadful illness, and immortalized her in art. ®

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