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Jackie Chan’s face made from 64,000 chopsticks, 20,000 tea bags for giant image of street vendor – Red Hong Yi’s incredible creations
- Malaysian visual artist Red Hong Yi tells the stories behind some of her most ambitious works in her first book, How To Paint Without a Brush
- Her works invite one to look at things differently, their success lying in her use of everyday materials, transformed and viewed in a different light
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She had initially dismissed the email, which was brief and void of detail, as spam. It was 2014 and the cryptic message had come into her inbox: “It went something like, ‘My boss would like a piece’,” recalls Red Hong Yi.
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By then, the Malaysian architect-turned-artist was starting to get noticed for her intriguing, large-scale portraits of Asian icons – Jay Chou Jie-lun, Zhang Yimou and Ai Weiwei among them – rendered with unorthodox materials such as coffee, socks and sunflower seeds, and this particular individual wanted to discuss having his own done.
Red quickly forgot about it, but a few days later the contact followed up. This time, the content of the message made her take notice. The “boss” was film star Jackie Chan.
You might connect the dots now between Red and an artwork that went viral ahead of the actor’s 60th birthday almost a decade ago – it was she who crafted an image of Chan’s face using 64,000 disposable bamboo chopsticks, tightly tied together and suspended from a steel frame.
Red says she was inspired after meeting Chan in Beijing to discuss the commission and rewatching some of his old films.
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