Most musicians like to perform so that others can hear their music. But one British death metal band is doing the exact opposite – they’re currently playing in an airtight, soundproof box where no one can hear them. They play until the oxygen runs out, and they run the risk of dying from asphyxiation.

The cube is an art installation by Portuguese artist João Onofre, called ‘Box Sized DIE’. According to the event organizers, Box Sized DIE has toured several European cities before, including Palais de Tokyo in France and MACBA in Spain. This is its first appearance in London. “Inspired by Tony Smith’s pioneering minimalist sculpture Die (1962), the steel box serves as a mobile location for the performance,” said the organizers. “In each location the sculpture travels to, Onofre invites a local Death Metal band to play, on this occasion, Unfathomable Ruination. The box is soundproofed, determining and restricting the performance’s duration to the length of time in which the oxygen is expended.”

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Hard core KFC fans have come up with the perfect way to pay homage to their favorite fast food brand – by wearing gold plated KFC bones as jewelry. The idea sounds rather primitive, but I suppose the gold plating does reduce the barbaric effect to some extent.

‘Kentucky Fried Chicken Bone Gold Necklaces’, are made of only two ingredients – real KFC bones and real 14 karat gold. They come in two sizes – small and large. The necklaces are the brainchild of Kentucky for Kentucky, a group of people with the mission to ‘engage and inform the world by promoting Kentucky people, places and products.’

Their official website states: “We’re excited to introduce a brand spanking new Kentucky invention. An invention so kick-ass, it will change the jewelery game forever. We’ve taken one great Kentucky invention and turned it into a completely new Kentucky invention. Like Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstopper, we’ve figured out a way to make it possible to savor a single piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken forever. Forever and ever. We all win.”

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Andrew Clemens (1857 – 1894) was an extraordinary self-taught artist from Iowa who created unbelievably intricate art using tiny grains of colored sand, with tools and techniques that were way ahead of his time. Although the man was completely deaf and nearly mute for most of his life, he managed to nurture his passion and make hundreds of bottles of beautiful sand art.

Clemens was born to German and Prussian parents who met and fell in love on their way to the United States. After living in various cities, his father finally moved the family to McGregor, Iowa, to take advantage of the gold-rush and the settlement of the American west. It was here that, at the age of five, Clemens was struck with ‘brain fever’ (or encephalitis as we know it today). Although he was lucky to survive, he permanently lost his hearing and speech to the disease.

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Talented Turkish artist Hasan Kale specializes in creating micro paintings on incredibly small objects, like butterfly wings and snail’s shells. In his latest project, he’s taken his micro painting skills to a whole new level – by using food as a canvas.

The list of edible objects that Kale has painted on includes peanut husks, split almonds, banana chips, fruit seeds, beans, onion peels, mini breadsticks, and even bits of chocolate. As long as it’s tiny, it appears that Kale will paint on it. He uses an extremely fine paint brush tip and a magnifying glass to paint intricate landscapes of his native Istanbul.

Through Kale’s work, you can enjoy a picturesque view of the Nusretiye Mosque and other scenes from Istanbul on a Milka Square, painted with such amazing detail. Of course, most of his work is microscopic, and therefore not very visible to the naked eye. You’d need some sort of magnification to be able to see the paintings clearly.

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Zuly Sanguino is a talented young artist and motivational speaker. The 24-year-old Colombian creates beautiful, colorful paintings of flowers and landscapes that have been exhibited in various shows. She has also given several motivational lectures at corporate organizations, schools and prisons. Zuly is an exceptional woman, mainly because she’s managed to achieve so much even though she was born without fully formed limbs.

Born with phocomelia, a congenital disorder that affected all four of her limbs, Zuly was destined for a life of disability. The doctors had informed her mother, Guillermina, that Zuly would have to be lying down all the time for the rest of her life. In spite of their poverty and terrible living conditions (they lived in shacks with dirt floors), Guillermina wouldn’t give up on her daughter – she taught young Zuly to sit at first, and then walk on her own without external support.

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Shanghai-based artist Hong Yi, a.k.a. ‘Red’, has combined her love for football and art in a very unique way – she recently painted a massive portrait of three superstars of the 2014 FIFA World Cup – Ronaldo, Neymar and Messi – by dribbling a paint-covered football on a canvas.

Red didn’t use a single paintbrush to create her amazing portraits of the three popular football players! Instead, she kicked a paint-stained football around on the canvas, and actually managed to paint highly accurate pictures of her subjects.

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Nanjing city, the capital of China’s Jiangsu Province, is the new home of the world’s largest and longest 3D street painting. The artwork, named ‘Rhythms of Youth’ was unveiled on June 11; it is a whopping 365 meters long, covering over 2,500 square meters on the campus of the Communication University of China (CUCN). It has set two new Guinness World Records  – one for the largest, and the other for the longest street painting in the world.

The technique used to make the 3D painting is known as ‘anamorphic’ – the artwork is painted in a distorted fashion so it will only look right from a certain point of view. The team that created it was led by famous Chinese artist Yang Yongchun. “It took my team more than 20 days to finish the painting on the ground,” he said. “Every day, we worked on it from daybreak when we could barely tell the colors apart until it was too dark to see anything. We’ve devoted all of our time, energy and attention to this painting.”

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Jay Freestyle, a South African tattoo artist based in Amsterdam, creates incredible, ethereal tattoos. And here’s the surprising bit – he works without a plan. It’s impossible to tell by looking at his work, but the 29-year-old inks freehand, making it all up as he goes. He works with only one motto: “Give me a piece of your skin and I’ll give you a piece of my soul.”

It doesn’t matter how many ideas you have in your head about your tattoo before you visit Jay. Once you speak to him and realize what he can do, you’re just going to turn around and say ‘Go for it, I trust you blindly’. So far, he has never disappointed a single client.

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25-year-old Ryosuke Ohtake is a master craftsman who recently tried his hand at ‘jizai okimono’ – the Japanese art of carving realistic wooden animals, complete with movable joints. He created a near-perfect lobster entirely out of boxwood. The sculpture is so life-like that when lifted, its claws, legs and tail move in the exact same way that a real, live lobster would.

A three-minute video clip that shows Ohtake working on the lobster with his various sculpting tools and blocks of wood, has become very popular online. In the video, he lifts the finished sculpture in his hands and shows exactly how each part moves. The details are simply mind-blowing.

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Not all forms of wall graffiti are acceptable – most are viewed as vandalism. But in the case of French street artist Patrick Commecy, homeowners actually invite him to paint on their walls. Along with his team of muralists, he transforms boring, dull patches of wall into vibrant scenes, full of life. In fact unless you have a ‘before’ picture, you might not even realize it’s a painting.

Patrick and his team travel across France, painting hyper-realistic windows and balconies on bare walls that resemble the rest of the building. They dress up these painted windows with plants, birds and sometimes even rocks and waterfalls. It all looks so real that it’s confusing for a moment – it’s hard to tell the difference between a real tree and the painted one.

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One day, 13 years ago, when retired fan maker John Brooker realized that his hedge was way too boring, he decided to do something about it. Since then, he has been sculpting it into a wonderful, mystical creature – a gigantic 150-foot long, 20-foot tall dragon, complete with a massive pair of wings and six sets of legs.

The dragon topiary – with its bulging eyes, flaring nostrils and crested back – is truly one-of-a-kind. Mr. Brooker, now 75, said: “I was standing at my kitchen sink one day and thought the hedge was boring so decided to do something with it. I think the dragon came from my days in the Army. I did two tours in Malaysia so the dragon must have been in my subconscious.”

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Jason Gamrath is a master glassblower from Seattle. His work primarily involves creating enormous, yet incredibly life-like orchids and carnivorous flowers using his expert glass blowing techniques. Through his art, he wants to help people appreciate the minute details of the plant kingdom on a magnified level.

Jason’s glass orchids are gigantic – each one is bigger than a human head. But Jason doesn’t compromise on detailing. The colors are vivid and all the features of real flowers are accurately represented on his glass replicas. “The purpose of creating this series on a macro scale is to bring to light the beauty that exists within the micro scale of nature,” he said. He wants to force people to notice the details that they’re prone to miss while ‘walking around as a big person’.

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If you thought painting bird feathers was difficult, wait till you check out this super-talented artist who paints on bird feathers. That’s right, Connecticut-based Brenda Lyons paints the most stunning animal portraits using moulted turkey feathers as a canvas, as a part of her ongoing series called ‘Painted Feathers’.

I seriously appreciate the kind of work Brenda does, because I can’t even hold something so delicate without eventually destroying it. And to actually apply acrylic paints directly on these feathers to create something so beautiful – it just blows my mind.

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43-year-old Fabian Gaete is an artist who specializes in finger painting. He’s so good at his craft that he can actually create small finger oil paintings of breathtaking landscapes in under three minutes.

Fabian currently works his magic on the streets of Puerto Montt, Chile, where his ‘live creations’ are sold at six euros each (or 10 euros for three). He moves around with a large black suitcase filled with oil paints and glass panels. As soon as he receives a request for a painting, he quickly uses his fingers to fill the panels with mountains, trees, rivers, waterfalls and more. In no time at all, the painting is completed, sealed and handed over to its new owner.

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Dmitry Tihonenko, from Belarus, is a household-appliance repairman with a passion for everything steampunk. Although he primarily uses his workshop to fix broken appliances, he has this amazing hobby going on on the side – creating steampunk masterpieces out of mundane, everyday objects.

You have to to admit that even though modern appliances make our lives a lot easier, design-wise they are not always as cool-looking as we’d like . They’re most often mass-produced, plastic replicas of each other. But that’s where Dmitry comes in – he takes boring appliances and converts them into something truly wonderful, as you can see in the pictures.

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