SHANGHAI, China (AP) - Enjoy painting but fed up with those hard-to-clean brushes? Chinese businessman Wang Yide has a way around the hassle: He paints with his tongue.

Wang, who runs a photo shop in the quiet southwestern town of Jianyan, recently gave a demonstration for journalists from a newspaper in the area, the Chengdu Evening News. He tongue-painted pictures of a lotus flower and a laughing Buddha.
“He was somewhat embarrassed when he slurped and drooled ink during his painting,” the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing the newspaper.

Wang, who Xinhua said was about 50 years old, said he learned the skill from the technique’s inventor, Huang Ernan, who died last year.
The report said Wang warned the uninitiated against trying the art without proper guidance, saying inks and pigments could be poisonous. It didn’t say, however, how he avoided poisoning himself.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20051010/D8D57HS00.html

Nyeh. Doesn’t sound too weird to me…

People have done worse,
if he’s been doing this for a while (i.e. slowly but surely) he may have built up an immunity to it. I belive there was once a king who, thinking someone was trying to kill him, drank small vials of poison until he became immune. When these people got into his castle/palace/whatever, he got so scared that they would torture him he tried to commit suicide by drinking poison. Of course, it didnt work and he got tortured and killed by the enemy, rather than ‘on his own terms’.

Not all paints are poisonous.  I suppose it would depend on what he mixed them with.  Hopefully not lead.

Charybdis - 11 October 2005 04:35 PM

Not all paints are poisonous.  I suppose it would depend on what he mixed them with.  Hopefully not lead.

Exactly. There are many natural pigments that are not poisenous.

In Prehistory they used to “spray-paint” by chewing pigments in the mouth and then spitting it on the cave walls. Its how parts of the paintings at Lascaux etc. were likely made. Lorblanchet has done experiments with that and its the only way he could recreate some elements of the paintings.

So the technique’s inventor died last year.  It would be interesting to know what he died of.