The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a photograph of Louise, one of Wim Delvoye's tattooed and taxidermied pigs. The artist, a vegetarian, has been creating porcine art since 1992. Residents of Delvoye's Art Farm outside of Beijing, the pigs undergo multiple tattooing sessions with professional tattooists. As the pigs mature, their elaborate skins — covered with Louis Vuitton logos, Disney princesses, biker designs, and religious icons — increase in size, thus growing as a work of art while saving the pigs from the slaughterhouse.

Born in 1965 in Wervik, a rural Belgian hamlet populated by more pigs than people, Delvoye now lives in Ghent, but can often be found on his Chinese farm, or in exhibition spaces and art fairs worldwide. A high-profile artist since the early '90s, he participated in documenta IX in 1992 and exhibited a life-size cement truck carved of teak at the 1999 Venice Biennale. In the summer of 2003, New York's Madison Square Park cradled Delvoye's Gothic, a series of enormous steel sculptures modeled after construction equipment, but rendered in breathtaking filigree. He is represented by Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris and Miami, Galerie Guy Bärtschi in Geneva, and Diehl + Gallery One in Moscow, where a solo show opens on September 17.

Delvoye's practice runs the gamut from sacred to scatological; his notable works include soccer goalposts framing a stained-glass scene of bourgeois life, windows capturing X-rays of his friends' sexual escapades, and, most infamously, the Cloaca contraptions. In zoological anatomy, a cloaca is an intestinal opening, while in ancient Rome, the Cloaca Maxima was the sewage system beneath the city. For Delvoye and his team of scientists, computer programmers, and chefs, Cloaca is a machine that consumes and digests food, then expels real excrement. Since 2000, he has produced a range of Cloacas, each with its own peculiar diet and digestive issues. These Frankenstein machines fart, suffer from constipation, and even drink beer, mimicking humanity not as a painting might, but arguably with greater accuracy.
- Lauren McKee