Ju Douqi's Vincent Van Gogh Made of Leek at The Vegetable Museum

Anyone for Leonardo's Mona Lisa composed of Chinese cabbage, kelp, celery, tofu, pepper and potatoes? Or a Last Supper, lovingly rendered in ginger, radish, tomato, shiitake mushrooms, bean curd, seaweed and rape?

A Chinese artist is taking the sensual side of food to its ultimate extreme, by recreating Old Masters out of vegetables and photographing the results. Then she invites her friends around for a big feed and they eat her creations.

It is intriguing to look at her version of Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, which she has called, naturally enough, Liberty Leading the Vegetables and imagine it marching into a rice bowl. That is all part of the environment message of the pieces.

"I have narrowed my works down to where I only use recycled materials," said Ju Duoqi , whose exhibition "The Vegetable Museum" has just opened at the Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery at the 798 art district in the Chinese capital. "So its easy for me to come up with the idea of making artworks with food, which is cheap and environmentally friendly."

Before the vegetable subjects are pinned together to make the cabbage collages, she boils or dries the contents, or uses preserved vegetables. The market for Chinese contemporary art has sunk a little because of the global economic crisis, but it is still performing well. Ms Ju's work is selling steadily. Among good sellers were "Cabbage Monroe" a vegetable version of Andy Warhol's 1967 pop-art Marilyn Monroe.

The exhibition combines many different Chinese interests and obsessions. The environment – especially air and water pollution – is a constant concern. Food is central to everything in China. An extremely common greeting is, "Have you eaten?" Vegetables are a running theme in Chinese art. A few years ago, one of the leading conceptual artists on the scene walked everywhere with a lettuce on a leash.

Ms Ju she came up with the idea in the summer of 2006 when she started making skirts, necklaces, headdresses and magic wands out of peas, before photographing herself wearing the result. Her show, which also features her take on Gustav Klimt's The Kiss and a particularly hilarious parody of Munch's The Scream, is another example of how Chinese artists breaking through and becoming more globally important.

"The Chinese are the most international artists now," said Jerome Sans, creative director of the Ullens Center for the Contemporary Arts in the 798 district. "Twenty years ago, there were zero Chinese artists, now they are having solo shows in every big city. It's about the individuals, not the scene." Ms Ju told the Guangzhou Daily newspaper that the taste of the vegetables used in the pictures is often meant to suggest the shape or spirit of the subject of the work. So, for example, the bitter taste of Beijing's favourite cucumber sauce is meant to suggest the sweat of the boat trackers in her rendition of Ilya Repin's "The Volga Boatmen".

Born in Chongqing in 1975, Ms Ju is a graduate of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, and worked designing websites and computer games as well as doing her vegetable paintings. "Using vegetables to reproduce these works is a lot of fun. I think there are a number of areas worth pondering. Don't you think?"

Each piece in the show took a month to complete, including retouching the content. She has used a small wooden barrel in her work to recreate the taste of Hunan cuisine's barrel rice. "The whole process is a lot of fun," she said. Imagining using a potato to be a soldier's face, rotten tomatoes to be blood. Fantasy is fun."