Art made from stickers has pop culture edge
Ye Hongxing is presenting works that use thousands of stickers to render wellknown pop culture images.
Her ongoing show at Beijing’s Opposite House also displays her installations and sculptures.
Among her installations is Mandala, a large thangka painting — an innovative take on the traditional Tibetan Buddhist art form — placed flat on ground with a pagoda standing on it. Both the painting and pagoda are made up of countless little things — the former by stickers and the latter by toys.
Snow White, the Smurfs, Angry Birds, Hello Kitty, fighters from the game Contra, dragons and all recognizable images from pop culture are made of stickers and toys.
Ye explains that people visit a temple or church to get spiritual enjoyment, which they now often obtain from going to shopping malls instead. The Beijing-based artist speak sin the context of the pagoda and thangka painting, both of which are important symbols of Tibetan Buddhism.
“The pursuit of happiness is the same. But the destination changes.”
Ye started to overlap stickers on her canvases in 2009. Before that, the playful pieces were just decorative material she stuck on her phone and computer. Once she began, she was fascinated with these colorful pieces and produced many paintings featuring them.
Advertisements, logos, patterns and words of slogans — all elements of daily life across the world — appear on her canvas through stickers.
She regularly goes to a wholesale market in Beijing that sells stickers and updates her works frequently. She says she notices how stickers stay topical in pop culture.
“If you want to know what’s popular in the world, just go visit a sticker shop,” says the 45-year-old artist.
Sometimes, she says she doesn’t even have an idea of the images on the stickers she uses. But she finds the answer from the sellers or collectors of such items.
“It’s easy for a viewer to connect with her works, regardless of background or nationality,” says Zhang Lexing, a gallerist and collector of Ye’s works.
“From a distance they look like beautiful pictures with vivid images or abstract patterns. A closer look will show motifs from daily life.”
Ye says her works focus on the subject of fullness to show the world rich in goods. People are bombarded with information and commodities but they don’t know what they really want.
Besides, the artist’s works reflect opposing entities: exciting and mundane, hard and soft.
Her sculpture A Thousand Years of Fragrance on display is made of more than 100 marble bottles of perfume and alcohol.
She has been collecting bottles, especially ones containing scents, for a decade. Her sculptures seek to show personal memories behind perfumes.
The show also displays an installation from Ye’s latest series Accumulation of Silence, which has more than 60 rock-shaped cushions placed together.
“We’re living in a world bombarded by information. Most of it makes no sense,” says Ye.
The series also includes some sticker paintings, which she is still working on. Placing thousands of little pieces on one canvas is usually time-consuming and tedious.
But the process is like meditation for her, she says. Mandala alone took her nearly two months.
“My art centers on the concept of fullness. I hope these popular motifs will let people think about their own lives — and what they really want in a society full of goods,” she says.