A very patient Vietnamese artist spent three years meticulously drilling a whopping 45,863 holes smaller than a human hair into a hollowed-out ostrich egg.
Nguyen Hung Cuong, a talented artist from Hanoi, Vietnam, has been turning chicken eggs into intricate works of art for over a decade, but his most recent project is by far his most impressive yet. The 30-year-old reportedly spent the last three years of his life carefully drilling tens of thousands of holes, some only 0.2 mm in diameter, to create one of the most impressive egg carving in human history.
The Vietnamese artist said that he came up with the idea of creating a record-setting egg carving after reading about the achievement of Mr. Hamit Hayran, a Turkish artist who a few years ago set a Guinness record for most holes drilled into a chicken egg, nearly 12,000. He told himself that Vietnam should have such a record, so he set ouut to one-up Hayran by drilling the most holes into an ostrich egg.
Cuong usually takes a few hours to a few days to complete a chicken egg carving, but for this latest project, he needed no less than 3 years. The 45,863 he patiently drilled into the ostrich egg shell, range from just 0.2 mm to 3 mm in diameter, and were counted by computers, using high-resolution scans of the egg. Zing News reports that the smallest holes are barely visible.
The talented artist said that chicken egg shell carving is a very laborious and painstaking process, but the ostrich egg carving was even more so, because the shell was harder and thicker, and he had to keep firm control of the drill to make holes the size of a single hair.
“The process requires me not to rush, to be patient. Even a little haste can ruin the whole egg, so I had to keep my composure down to the very last hole,” Nguyen Hung Cuong said.
Cuong’s artwork was recently recognized by Vietnam’s Record Organization, and the artist said that he is currently working on submitting it to Guinness Records as well, hoping to have it recognized as the egg shell carving with most drilled holes.
