Taking a Stand
Whether it’s art for art’s sake or one with a cause, Red Hongyi and her team are pushing against the conventional confinements of contemporary art
Red Hongyi pushes back against the conventional confinements of contemporary art
“My late grand-uncle was an oil painter who used to paint posters for the Chinese Communist Revolution,” artist Red Hongyi recalls, visibly wistful as she peers over the phone while I scroll through her Instagram story highlights. “He was initially trained and influenced by European paintings, and had even done some of his landscape paintings before most of his original work was destroyed during the revolution.”
“The artists had to paint a very specific style, you see,” Red continues. “It was all about using vibrant colours and drawing healthy-looking people—they weren’t allowed to do it their way, nor were they allowed to truly express themselves.”
The whole ordeal, Red says, scarred her grand-uncle so much that he never picked up his brush again, but that never stopped him from helping his grand-niece.
“Whenever I brought my work over, he’d give me comments like ‘oh, your portraits are good, but you’re not getting the shading of the mouth right! You need to remember that the teeth have
“He’s always told me that in order for an artist to have a unique voice, one simply had to be themselves and not try to be like anyone else”
—RED HONGYI
curvature!’” she laughs. “Which is why I always ask my subjects to close their mouths whenever I draw portraits now—i get nervous whenever I have to draw teeth.”
Referring to him as one of her biggest mentors, Red remembers a pivotal moment in 2018 (the last she ever saw of him before his passing in that very same year), where her grand-uncle had immediately recognised her charred weave piece before she even announced it as such. “He’s always told me that in order for an artist to have a unique voice, one simply had to be themselves and not try to be like anyone else.”
Evidently, she’s taken his advice to heart; from getting her masters in architecture in Melbourne to becoming a full-time architect in Shanghai, Red never gave up her passion for art. Piecing together larger-than-life installations of China’s influential figures such as a 100,000-sunflower seed portrait of contemporary artist Ai Weiwei to using nothing but basketballs to illustrate basketball player Yao Ming in 2012, the artist took the world by storm and was dubbed ‘the artist who paints without a paintbrush’ by many.
“It’s been quite a ride really,” Red muses thoughtfully. “Over the nine years I’ve been in this industry, I think I’ve gone through seasons where I’ve kept to similar aesthetics, but it’s always been imperative that my work be rooted to my heritage and become a reflection of my current surroundings. I’m now more focused on the message behind the piece, of tackling social issues and conveying how I feel about certain events. At the end of the day, I want my art to talk to people and be more than just a pretty image that’s in it for the clickbait.”
Having taken to social media long before the digital storm descended in 2020, Red notes that it has allowed for artists the freedom to further explore their craft, and more importantly, gain exposure; which is something a ‘traditional gallery model’ doesn’t necessarily offer. But as the gallery model changes, so does the approach of an artist when it comes to getting their work out there—before, it was the worry of whether or not they would be represented by a gallery; now, it was whether or not their work had sufficient reach online.
“I used to be in a place where
I was so fixated on the number of my followers,” she says. “At times when I wasn’t careful, that obsession diluted the quality of my work, and it transformed my ‘artwork’ into becoming the ‘next clickbait thing’, which admittedly lacked quality and wasn’t wellresearched or well thought-out.
“But after I quit being an architect, the main challenge was to get commissioned projects when I first started out—i needed clients to approach me because I had to stay afloat for the next project. Today, while I’m lucky enough to have a team behind my back, the challenge now is for me to really step it up, to focus on my own craft and not have to worry about whether or not I should take on a commercial piece.”
Last April, Red and her six-person team made headlines as her work was featured on Time magazine’s
Climate Is Everything cover. After two weeks of putting together a