Australian performance artist Mike Parr is back above ground after spending three days buried beneath a busy Hobart street in a steel box.
The 73-year-old was dug up on Sunday night from underneath Macquarie Street as part of an out-of-the-box piece for Tasmania's annual Dark Mofo festival.
Parr had spent 72 hours meditating, drawing and reading Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore in the small container, with water but no food.
It took road workers with heavy machinery about two hours to carefully dig through bitumen and lift the lid on his temporary home.
Parr silently emerged and walked into a nearby building to the cheers of hundreds who had anxiously watched in the rain.
The performance "Underneath the Bitumen the Artist" was billed as memorialising the victims of 20th century totalitarian violence.
Some Tasmanian indigenous groups branded the work insulting but Aboriginal community member Nala Mansell was supportive.
"Aboriginal history in Tasmania has been buried for over 200 years and I think it's a great way to symbolise the fact that people are still unaware of Aboriginal history in Tasmania," she told reporters.
Other onlookers were left baffled.
"I don't take anything away from it all," Carolyn Bowerman from Townsville told AAP.
"I'm just amazed that someone would put themselves through this and go to this much effort."
Oxygen was pumped into the container to keep Parr alive as traffic drove above him.
He is no stranger to confronting artworks, having once hacked his prosthetic arm with an axe in front of a shocked audience.
Parr is expected to speak on Tuesday at a public forum about his recent experience.
Dark Mofo, produced by the Museum of Old and New Art, has sparked controversy elsewhere this year, drawing the ire of some Christians by erecting inverted crosses on the city's waterfront
