For Zhu Yu, whose performance art had featured human brains and aborted fetuses, the subject of his latest oil paintings is more mundane: dinner leftovers.From a digital photo, he transferred carefully arranged shrimp shells or black beans tossed in chili sauce on to canvas, retouching it until a photo-realistic portrait emerged. The oil smudges, morsels on each ``Leftover'' picture resemble the hills, rocks and meandering brooks of Chinese ink paintings.``I wanted to show that there's beauty even in the things that we abandon in life,'' Zhu said in an interview at Xin Beijing Art Gallery. ``Our ideas of aesthetics were influenced over the ages by handicapped and unnatural objects, including gold fish, bound feet and artists' rocks; so my focus on leftovers is a challenge to the orthodox concept of beauty.''Zhu, 37, is one of 33 emerging Asian artists who will exhibit their works from April 25 at the China International Gallery Exposition in Beijing. As many as 40,000 people are expected to visit the four-day fair, which brings together paintings, sculptures, photos, installations and video artworks from more than 80 galleries in 22 countries.Eight of Zhu's ``Leftover'' paintings will occupy a special booth at the exhibition. He paints up to eight pieces a year, each taking more than a month of research and work to complete. The artist has already sold more than 10 of the 180 centimeter (71- inch) square paintings, priced at 400,000 yuan ($57,200) at Xin Gallery. Taikang Life Insurance Co., China's fifth-largest life insurer, owns three of them.Exploding LambZhu will also show a 2-meter bronze plate, cast from a fragment of a vase he had smashed. On the plate, he placed a freshly slaughtered lamb that had been sliced in half, and stuffed it with explosives. He then blew up the carcass, piled the strips of flesh back on the plate, poured molten bronze over it, and cast it into a sculpture called ``Fragments.''``It's the reproduction of a ritual performed during the Shang and Zhou dynasties using bronze vessels,'' Zhu said.For a Shanghai show in 1999 called ``Supermarket,'' Zhu bottled 80 jars of mashed human brains obtained from an anatomy laboratory. In a nod to Piero Manzoni's 1961 work ``100 percent pure artist's sh*t,'' Zhu labeled his jars ``human brain'' and put them up for auction, even managing to sell some of them.The work, called ``The Foundation of All Knowledge,'' was aimed at expressing the meaning of life after death, Zhu said.Craving Controversy``The brain is reduced from a reservoir of ideas to a mass of dead tissues when the host dies,'' he said. ``I felt that the only way to capture my feeling of loss was by mashing it up.''His subsequent works in 2000 and 2001 were even more controversial. They used aborted fetuses, severed limbs, cadavers and a piece of his abdominal skin as materials.``I was walking on the edge of my own personal universe, challenging the absolute limits of my feelings,'' Zhu said in Beijing, recounting the earlier performances that were reviled by China's art critics and media.With ``Leftover,'' the artist, born in China's southwestern city of Chengdu, has revived his training as an oil painter.``The series may give the audience, art directors and critics a new way to understand Zhu's work, to shrug off the controversies of the past,'' said Shu Yang, a performance artist who wrote a preface for the catalogue of Zhu's latest work.