know your body inside out

It doesn’t look like they hit very many venues (LA and Taipei only in the current listings), but the Bodyworlds exhibit is pretty amazing. They have exhibition cases with specific organs, and then lots and lots of human bodies. Bodies standing, bodies sitting, bodies catching soccer balls and swinging a lasso, I'm surprised they didn't have one doing downward facing dog. The bodies are cut up in all sorts of different ways to expose various parts and their interactions. Lots of corpses in various modes of undress, from all the way down to the bones to bones and innards only to muscles and nerves that are pulled away from the body parts to give a sense of how they are put together and layered on to one another. Artery structures of this and that (did you know ducks have arteries in their beaks?). And other corpses showing different types of things on the same body: left side musculature, right side bones and innards. Little slices of sinus that look like nothing so much as the animal-face decorations on early Chinese bronzes. A standing figure with cubes of various parts of its body cut out and brought forward so you can see the cross section of, for instance, its thigh. Weekly foetus development in tubes, from week 1 (smaller than a snot) to the beginning of week 8 (sudden growth explosion) to the end of week 8 (discernible fingers). And my favorite, a body cut open and splayed out in all sorts of strange places and twists, the halves of its head half-facing each other so that it is a real, dead human version of a Picasso.

Highly recommended if it comes to your neighborhood.