Shaoping fired 3,000 ceramic eggs for the Metamorphosis series, according to the Today Art Museum, which recently reviewed the artist’s bewitching art installation.

Depicted in these pictures through various desert scenes, the project involved placing the 10kg eggs, which together weigh 48 tons, in various remote landscapes throughout China – as a reminder not only of the beautiful of life, but also the fragility.

They traveled from the Behai coast to the Yardang landforms and the Black Gobi, and from the sand dunes of Dunhuang to the Gannan grassland, according to Designboom.

That’s a lot of commitment to an art project, and entails an extraordinary outlay of materials and money.

“As a loner of contemporary art, Shi Shaoping is obviously more insane than those ordinary explorers,” writes the gallery review.

“He puts the 3,000 eggs which symbolize the origin and birth, fragility and beauty, circle and regain of life into the broad see, the mysterious castle, the barren ruin and the fertile grassland. How the eggs are gonna develop themselves in these totally different conditions? How they fight? How they reproduce?”

Now the eggs are lying in the museum, but tomorrow, 9 September, 2013, their long journey will come to an end. In the meantime, desert art requires a special kind of reflection.

“Life is like running water, sometimes it is quiet, and sometimes it is wild,” writes the museum art critic. “There are unfulfilled dreams and helpless confusion lying in the memory of life.”

For more local desert art, take a look at Richard Allenby-Pratt’s Consumption series – photographs from the Middle East that depict the entire cycle of society’s consumer behavior, from extracting raw materials to refinement of them and finally, the actual consumption of the end product.

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