Beijing-based artist Ye Hongxing uses stickers and crystals to create large-scale collages on canvas, bright in color and mesmerizing in the complex compositions that juxtapose traditional Chinese imagery with the joyously psychedelic.
Hongxing’s large-scale canvases dazzle the viewer with their dizzyingly busy compositions and joyously psychedelic palette. They teem with pop-culture motifs alongside ancient imagery. Her artwork champions brilliantly colorful art that experiments with materials, though her work is as thoughtful as it is decorative, as her own words reveal: “China’s unique 5,000-year-old civilization makes its collision with western culture today more intense.” Multilayered, it intriguingly reveals a seemingly infinite number of images. You see something new every time you look at a piece.
Hongxing’s new “Paradise” series of mixed media works of art is composed of brightly colored sequins and glass beads, which create a mesmerizing blend of a myriad different elements including fantastical figures, religious imagery, and tropical flora and fauna. Ye states that her work is a commentary on the swift development of China’s social system. She represents iconographic figures and religious symbols with kitsch material, a startling juxtaposition and unsettling contrast between the sacred and the profane, the respected elite and the trashy commercial.
In her “Fusion” series Hongxing combines traditional Chinese motifs, designs seen on antique silk and porcelain, superimposed on self-portraits and presented as a circular image; the result is a mystical sense of the fusion of history and tradition with self and the contemporary.
“I like dense materials,” explains Hongxing. “Using stickers is a conscious challenge to traditional and conventional mediums. A sticker has an enormous amount of information in it, they reflect the time we’re living in and they are fragmented and mosaic, so I can give them a new order in the landscape I’m creating.
Hongxing’s sticker mosaics in her “East of Eden” series juxtapose traditional Chinese imagery such as mandalas, Buddhist symbols, and tigers, with modern objects of kitsch including cars and kittens. “The rapid changes that are happening in China have a very profound impact on me, sometimes exciting, and sometimes contradictory and confusing at the same time.
Each piece is a mosaic of stickers; round-edged, colorful, and depicting cartoon characters, they embody a very twee and childlike quality. Hongxing creates printed outlines before painstakingly assembling the stickers into their assigned sections, much like a painting by numbers. From a distance the individuality of each sticker disappears, instead carrying color for the overall picture.
Since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the West has influenced Chinese society and culture, but the artist retains Chinese aesthetics through the Asia-sourced stickers whilst teaming them with the chaotic and lively addition of Western culture. Like Internet pages, Hongxing’s stickers are densely pixelated and a bombardment of information, but most essentially, they are n intensification of motivation in East Asia.
Implied narratives can be found in every work, where glamorous figures jostle for space within tropical landscapes where tigers, birds, and sea-life seem to burst out of the canvas—a disheartening reminder of the dangers to our environment and the effects of industrialization.
In 2004 she was selected by the curator of the Asian Art Museum in California and the director of Art Cologne as one of China’s top 20 rising artists.