"My penchant for hats, for instance, is not reflective of an artistic demeanor; it has more to do with my self-image as an inventor," writes Gunther von Hagens, the German inventor of "plastination."
At the unveiling earlier this week in Taipei of Body Worlds, The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, the professor stayed on pitch, lauding his achievements and sharing the details of his enterprise.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BODY WORLDS
As he swept out of the conference room and took the media on a tour of the exhibition -- his trademark hat topped off the sartorial statement of his dark tailored suit -- he seemed to be an apt underworld figure: the guardian of the dead.
He had a laser pen which he pointed at some of his favorite items, the cross-sectioned slice through a liver, for example, pointing out the spleen nearby, and the thoracic vertebra. Or, a selection of artistically posed dead bodies, one playing chess.
He also hammed it up with the museum directors and a senior academic for the TV cameras -- but in a suitably restrained manner, befitting an undertaker.
With him was Angelina Whalley, a long-term collaborator of von Hagens who does the planning for his exhibitions. She dealt with reporters who asked questions such as: "Why aren't there more women [plastinated in the exhibition]. Is it because they're more shy?"
"Perhaps, but that's not the reason," she replied.
Whalley and von Hagens control the patents for plastination and the company that makes the plastic polymers used in the process, in which resins replace the bodily fluids that make up 70 percent of the body. The rest of the body is embalmed in a variety of ways.
The exhibitions have been hugely popular since the first in Mannheim, Germany, in 1997 and have helped pay for plastination institutes in Heidelberg, Germany; Kyrgyzstan; and Dalian, China.
Von Hagens energetically promotes his work and has appeared on a float in the Berlin Love Parade wearing a "skeleton" costume. He did a dissection in front of a London audience last year.
Clearly, he is a man with a mission. His heroes are his forebears in anatomy, from Plato to Leonardo da Vinci, to Honore Fragonard. He says he thinks about plastination all the time and the result is a show of the human body that is, of course, revealing, and also inspiring.
As an entertainer, inventor and keeper of the dead, von Hagens has scored a deserved hat trick.
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