Hongyi Plays With Her Food (Art/Video)

"I like to paint, but not with a paintbrush," describes Red Hong Yi.  She's a Shanghai-based Malaysian artist-architect whose playful pieces have caught my attention.  She seems to be most well known for her portraits, carefully choosing her medium to reflect the character in her pieces.  For example, she uses sunflower seeds in her Ai Wei Wei portrait, she used a basketball to bring a painting of Yao Ming to life, and here in the video below, you'll see she used coffee cup stains to put together a portrait of singer Jay Chou.

What inspired me?
The project was inspired by the opening line in Jay Chou's song, 'Secret/不能说的秘密'. It is inspired by the opening sentence, about lifting up a coffee cup off the saucer, "冷咖啡离开了杯垫" and the ending of the song about autumn leaves and fragmented pieces, "飘落后才发现 这幸福的碎片, 要我怎么捡?". This is shown through the portrait as a whole - how it's formed by many individual rings, many of them broken and imperfect like fallen autumn leaves, forming Jay Chou's portrait. The story of the song is about a girl who travelled forward 20 years in time and met Jay in 1999, and they fell in love. She then went back to 1979 and sketched out the portrait of him. My painting is meant to look like a sepia-toned old photograph to capture the essence of this story.

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