Zhuang Hong Yi: A Touch of Pink

The flower motif is dominant throughout Zhuang Hong Yi’s work. In Chinese culture the flower is a significant image, which carries countless meanings and emotions. Zhuang's well known Flowerbed works are crafted from delicate pieces of painted rice paper, which he has bent and folded into hundreds of tiny buds that subtly shift colours as you move your body and eyes from one side of the work to the other. The floral hybrids evince an artist with genuine sensibility - the painstaking process of folded rice-paper layered with acrylic and oil paint belies an almost ascetic level of discipline. 

Zhuang also implements a more traditional painterly approach through his Landscape works  that bear influence of Impressionism and other Euro-American artistic practices in which he applies acrylic in heavily gestural impasto with rice-paper flowers. Working with a freedom of style, his daring strokes of bright colours are expressive and unconfined. Colours melting together and paint dripping down make the canvas blossom under the eye: appearing to move and thrive with the viewer, a beautifully defiant natural symbol in the face of aggressive global urbanization. Utilizing a traditional Chinese material, the works also represent traditional Chinese aesthetics: Zhuang Hong Yi’s paintings are meditations on color, nature and form. The enthralling effect of colors changing in unexpected ways in the artists work, enhances the traditional flow of a flower field in Spring time, yet is also utterly contemporary and abstract. Zhuang’s work is built upon his native country’s well-established artistic traditions and boundaries, which he has married with the Dutch encouragement of freedom of style. Embracing his present without losing his past the artist strives to define a sense of self that exists between the two. 

This is the personal struggle that Zhuang enacts visually and through his artistic processes, which vacillate between phases of controlled planning, emotional gesture, and careful editing. Objects of appealing beauty, mysterious and alluring - at once both foreign and familiar - are the result. Zhuang Hong Yi’s liberation in terms of both aesthetics and technique make his work unique and instantly recognizable.