Artist Uses Everyday Objects to Create Masterpieces

By
Brenda Mitchell
-
Image via redhongyi/Instagram

Hong Yi, better known as Red, is a Malaysian born artist who believes that creativity is everywhere, saying, “I hope this inspires you and makes you realize that you can get creative with anything, even with limited tools, and that like a child, you’ll see joy and fun even in ordinary, everyday items.”

She uses ordinary objects and materials for her artworks to transform our understanding of image-making, as an artist who “paints without a paintbrush.”

Currently, she’s working on her first solo exhibition while managing her design studio, Red One Studio. Check out her amazing creations below.

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How many of you in the US have seen this on TV? 😆🙈 I shot this with agency @intertrend for @Chase (one of the big 4 banks in the US) last April in Taipei, and the ad was released this year. The artwork is in Long Beach now. It was created with 5 types of tea leaves sealed with a layer of resin on a timber panel. I haven’t seen this on TV yet; thank you for sending me videos of you catching this on TV! Fun fact: that isn’t my real dad! My real dad was too camera-shy especially when he heard that he might have to cry on set. But now I think he gets jealous every time I show him this video. 😂😂😂 I was told by my Taiwanese assistant, Joy, that my actor Dad has been on many Taiwanese drama series playing dad characters. 🕺

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Back to the grind! 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻 Unbroken Vase against the morning light pouring into my studio space. . “There is a crack, a crack in everything//That's how the light gets in” ~ Leonard Cohen . . Working on a new piece made of cracked eggshells. “You are like a beautiful vase…but up close I see many cracked pieces.” I heard that spoken over someone dear to me 10 years ago and that image has lingered in my mind since then. A decade more of life has made me learn that we all hold cracked pieces and that life is not a smooth, linear climb to the top of the mountain of success (as often seen on FB/Instagram), but often a messy hop or crawl or dive instead. And in spite of the cracks, we can still be whole and perhaps even more beautiful. . This is a personal piece for a series of 20 vases based on different themes and colours that I will be working on for an exhibition next year. Email at [email protected] to enquire, for interested collectors.

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|||TEA LEAVES||| Excited to show you my new piece! Recently I’ve been fascinated with tea leaves as a new medium of artistic expression. Tea is native to Asia (specifically Southwest China) and I love the cultural significance of this material. It comes in various colours and textures, and with resin poured onto it, it’s ROCK-HARD, so the piece can be kept for a long time. . . . One of my first pieces with tea is this tiger portrait – I used 5 types of tea leaves: black tea, chrysanthemums, osmanthus, tiger lilies, and rose buds. When scattered onto the canvas, these tea leaves resembled fur. I hope it portrays the beauty of these gorgeous endangered big cats. . . . This piece was made for JPMorgan Chase (@chase) under the agency @intertrend. My US friends – have you seen it on ads yet? Big thanks to my assistant Joy 张吉 for helping me with this project, and for @teaandspice for donating bags of tea to me 😂

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Who are some people who have helped you in your journey? I’ve been lucky to have a few amazing souls along my way who have taken a chance on me! . . . I was still working full-time when this piece was created, and I was very lucky that I had colleagues who were happy to help me with this installation after work (2nd and 3rd photos!), and an extremely supportive boss who not only funded this project, but also offered to give me a 6 month-long sabbatical to consider where my art career could take me (in his words, “I have two daughters. If you were my daughter I would encourage you to explore art because it might take you further”). He also said I could go back to the company if I decided that art wasn’t for me. Thank you, Peter! :’) . . . Last post of my sock installation! I want to post my projects in posts of 3…it’s all about curation on the ‘Gram amirite? Photos of a new project I’ve been working on up tomorrow!

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I am a believer in the power of side projects! When I first graduated from university and was working in an architecture firm, I had nothing to show in my art portfolio. I was however inspired to work on side projects over the weekends as a creative outlet, and never did I think that it would kickstart an art career! So even if you hold a full-time job, I hope this will encourage you to work on projects you’re interested in over the weekends, even if it’s just for fun. Do it for yourself – you also never know what it’ll lead to! . . . Here’s a throwback to that time I gathered 2000 socks from a wholesale market in Shanghai, and pinned it together with 6000 safety pins (with the help of my awesome colleagues at @hassell_studio). We hung it off a bamboo pole and installed it in a quaint little alleyway in the French Concession area of Shanghai. It’s a tribute to film maker Zhang Yimou, who portrays the Chinese culture beautifully through his choice of costumes and bamboo forests in his work.

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FRAGRANT HARBOUR|| . . ✨✨ Inspiration behind my work (swipe to see!). ✨✨ I was inspired by contemporary artist Wu Guan Zhong's painting (second image) and architect Junya Ishigami's drawing (third image) when I created this artwork of the skyline of Hong Kong. I love the delicate and simple strokes and details in both Wu and Ishigami's works. For many years, Wu's artistic hybrid of Western modernism and traditional Chinese painting has inspired me and I've hoped to reflect that in my art. Ishigami's drawings I only recently stumbled upon when doing research on architectural drawings and I was immediately drawn to his simple, light, fantasy-like landscape drawings. I chose dried lotus flower petals for clouds and small, thin twigs as ripples to look like soft ink strokes. While I create work, I study other artists' works to observe what has worked and what has not worked for them. I ask myself why I like what I see and what in it makes me feel a certain emotion. I also make it a point to learn something from these already-made pieces and then create something original still by creating it in my own style. Lately I have been inspired to engage directly with issues of cultural identity and share about how heritage has influenced my work. . . HK Repertory Theatre (香港話劇團) is the oldest and largest professional theatre company in Hong Kong and I'm honoured to be collaborating with them this year to create visuals for their 2018 productions. My artwork will be in train stations, ferries and billboards in the coming months. If you want to see this piece in person, do visit the HK City Hall – it will be there for the next two months! ☺️ Special thanks to my teammates Lee Kah Yee, Danielle Soong and Mel Lo for working on this with me.

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FRAGRANT HARBOUR|| . . (2/2) Swipe right – you should be able to see the posts swipe over smoothly! This is my first "panoramic" post 😂 . . . Inspired by the literal translation of its Chinese name, Hong Kong means "Fragrant Harbour". This piece of the HK skyline was created with materials that make up the smells of HK, sourced from markets and traditional herbal shops in Hong Kong: tea leaves, dried chrysanthemum flowers, beans, lotus leaves, rose buds and petals, and other dried plants. These are everyday materials that HKers are familiar with, constructed to compel viewers to celebrate the city and the details that make it so special. . Special thanks to my team: Lee Kah Yee, Danielle Soong and Mel Lo

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FRAGRANT HARBOUR || Inspired by the literal translation of its Chinese name, Hong Kong means "Fragrant Harbour". This piece of the HK skyline was created with materials that make up the smells of HK, sourced from markets and traditional herbal shops in Hong Kong: tea leaves, dried chrysanthemum flowers, beans, lotus leaves, rose buds and petals, and other dried plants. These are everyday materials that HKers are familiar with, constructed to compel viewers to celebrate the city and the details that make it so special. Special thanks to my team: Lee Kah Yee, Danielle Soong and Mel Lo . . HK Repertory Theatre (香港話劇團) is the oldest and largest professional theatre company in Hong Kong and I'm honoured to be collaborating with them this year to create visuals for their 2018 productions. My artwork will be in train stations, ferries and billboards in the coming months. 🙂 If you want to see this piece in person, do visit the HK City Hall – it will be there for the next two months!

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Imprint art 3 of 30. Today I used a cross-section of a pulasan, a tropical fruit that looks and tastes like a rambutan. Swipe right for photos! This was a hard one to use – I thought the spikey profiles would be more prominent and dramatic but it's just…fuzzy oval shapes. Maybe the acrylic paint flattened all the layers. I was aiming for various opacities so I might try water colour instead. I'm a night owl and I occasionally hassle honest-enough friends for their opinions on my work. The feedback for this tonight was, "Very kiddo hahaha". . . I thought these imprints would be easier to control but it's turning out more challenging than I thought. Perhaps it's because of the scale? Subject? Paint? I'll probably try using a non-perishable product tomorrow and maybe eventually mix my materials. . . . Also! Thanks for all your comments! It's nice going back to posting more consistently on IG, I appreciate this community so much! :') I avoided posting here for a while and just stuck to Stories because I got precious about curating a nice-looking account and then all subsequent posts hardly qualified for "good enough". 😂😂😂So here I'm pushing posts out even if it I'm not quite happy with my work. Do you relate? Oh and I'm trying to reply to my DMs as much as I can. Sorry if I did not reply, but know that I do read all your messages! ❤️

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Imprint art 2 of 30. I experimented with a cross-section of a lotus root today. For those who are not familiar with them, swipe right to see what they look like. They grow in murky waters and from them lotus flowers eventually emerge (great life metaphor!). I learned that if my paint was too thick the paint would get stuck in the holes in between and the stamp would lose its shape, so the paint had to be the right consistency. . I also experimented with scale and liked it a lot better when the piece is seen from afar. Swipe right to see close-up. The first image has been mirrored for scale. . I don't use much colour in my art though I admire artists who do, so recently I've been trying to introduce colour into my work and it is a challenge for me! Single hues are much easier imo. Two years ago, I saw artist Dan Colen's works of dots and colours at the De La Cruz Foundation in Miami and was mesmerized by them. They didn't seem to mean anything, just big abstract paintings of colourful splotches, but it made me happy! . #crosssection #painting #lotusroot #details #mirror //ps: how do I break my paragraphs on Instagram? Even if it's on a separate paragraph, they join up into one so I have to break it with full stops and they still connect with the previous character. Anyone?

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Imprint art 1 of 30! This month (year?) I'm experimenting with imprints of materials around me. Zoom in for details. 👀 I'm curious about materiality and what a cross-section through an object might reveal to us. This piece was made with an okra cross-section (photo attached! If you've not heard of it, it's a slimy vegetable with a pentagonal cross-section. Also called "Ladies' Fingers"). . As a single imprint, the object might not be interesting but when it is repeated it over and over again something else happens. I'm curious about this jump from single to multiple, about freezing the temporary and ephemeral. Let's see what happens! I'm not sure what images I'm creating yet; just exploring patterns of the imprints for this one. . Also, I'll be traveling to Japan soon and look forward to discovering materials that I'll find there! Maybe sea-urchins could help me out? 😝🙃

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Some close-ups of "Bloom", commissioned by Mandarin Oriental (@mo_hotels) in Macau. This piece was made of 10,000 flowers piped with paint! The client wanted the piece to be themed around a lotus (Macau's national flower) and I did not want the subject to be too literal so I came up with the idea of piping different types of blooming flowers in various shades and colours to form a vague outline of a lotus flower. The painting can be enjoyed both up close and from a distance. It took a while to figure out the texture and consistency of the paint – I had to get it stiff enough so the petals would hold up and not flop like goo! Also I was in LA when I found the right paint for this so I had to carry 60 kilos of this all the way to Macau 😂 . . . I do love the symbol of the lotus: they rise out of the dirt and grow into something beautiful. ✨✨✨I guess this applies to flowers in general – but the lotus is extra badass cos they rise from dirty water! Think lotus mode when you face your next challenge. We grow most through adversity and phases that just plain suck, if we choose to grow. 💪🏻 If you're in Macau, check it out – it's in the lobby lounge!

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