Paper busts gaining attention

At first glance- it's a bust made of plaster, or maybe clay. But look again... these sculptures from an artist in China are actually made out of thousands of pieces of fine paper.

Li Hongbo says he's always loved working with paper- a material first invented in China.

The flexible nature of paper, Li says, allows him to transform one shape into another, literally and metaphorically.

(SOUNDBITE)(Mandarin) ARTIST LI HONGBO SAYING:

"At the beginning, I discovered the flexible nature of paper through Chinese paper toys and paper lanterns. Later, I used this to make a gun. A gun is solid, used for killing, but I turned it into a tool for play or for decoration. In this way, it lost both the form of a gun, and the culture inherent to a gun. It became a game."

Using a stencil, Li glues page upon page of fine paper into massive blocks which he then stacks on top of each other.

He uses saws and sanders to chisel the paper into replicas of busts he used to dra