Vietnamese artist Ben Tre (Dieu Khac Mien Tay) uses his steady hands and a tiny dentist’s drill to carve detailed portraits and traditional landscapes on chicken eggshells. The exquisite artworks can be mounted on an LED-illuminated base and used as artistic lamps. The artist, who says that he has only been creating these stunning works of art for the past year, has already amassed quite the collection of eggshell sculptures. He apparently experimented with a number of fine tools to get the desired effect, before borrowing a small electrical drill from a dentist friend, and has been using it ever since. He specializes in both celebrity portraits and landscapes. The artworks generally comprise of two types of vivid portraits; firstly of famous historical and contemporary figures like Karl Marx, Queen Elizabeth II and Albert Einstein, and secondly of various scenes from the ‘life and culture’ of South Vietnam. Landscapes generally take the artist 3 hours to complete while portraits can take up to a couple of days to master. And the remarkable part is that you can feel their finesse with your fingers while you are admiring them with your eyes.The eggs aren’t chemically treated to harden the shell, which makes the artworks very vulnerable, but Ben offers interested clients the option of having the eggshell carvings encased in a glass globe for protection. An LED illuminated wooden base is also available to enhance the beauty of his fragile masterpieces.
