Zhuang Hong Yi

The flower motif dominates the work of Zhuang Hong Yi’s – an artist based between Beijing and Holland – a significant image in Chinese culture which carries countless meanings and emotions with equally strong associations with the Netherlands.

Year after year, he works patiently and religiously on this subject, intricately crafting his works with care and forethought. Zhuang’s well known and highly collected ‘flower bed’ works are crafted from delicate pieces of painted rice paper, which he has bent and folded into hundreds of tiny buds.

Working with a freedom of style, as if liberated from his native country’s well-established artistic traditions and boundaries, Zhuang’s impasto strokes of daring, bright colours are expressive and unconfined. Colours melt together and paint drips down the canvas, seeping over a collage of delicately unfolded rice paper flowers. The almost sculptural three-dimensionality renders these works both painting and object. Messiness, variety and chance are all embraced, drawing the viewer inwards, encouraging contemplation as they immerse us in a tapestry of colour.

Other materials comprising his work are traditionally Chinese – ink, rice paper, porcelain, and wood; they are bound together by the artist in a style that alludes to Western Impressionism. As such, Zhuang Hong Yi unites elements from the Eastern and the Western traditions as their confluence blooms.

The seamless and graceful blend of Chinese and Western cultural influences in Zhuang Hong Yi’s work reflects his upbringing in China, followed by years of European experience after moving to the Netherlands in 1990, settling with his artist wife, Luluo. A love and admiration of flowers is evident through Hong Yi’s work, linking the two dominant cultural influences of his life. While The Netherlands’ relationship with flowers is well documented – finding its most potent expression in the historic tulip mania of the 17th century – in China flowers are uniquely symbolic, representing growth, fulfilment and prosperous beginnings, as well as manifesting good chi. Recurrent in Hong Yi’s work are the lucky chrysanthemum and lotus flowers, signifiers of metaphysical purity and strength. Even after decades of living in Europe, Zhuang Hong Yi maintains a studio in Beijing, where he returns a few times each year to work, collecting new materials and inspiration.

Most recently, Hong Yi has pursued his fascination with light, fabricating a sense of motion with colour gradients as they play on perspective. Zhuang finds freedom in the act of creating and uses this process as a medium for addressing the harm endured by nature.

Following the astounding success of his premier UK solo exhibition – ‘RAW’ – in September 2015, Zhuang Hong Yi returned to Unit London in March 2017 with ‘RAW II’, a powerful body of works that further demonstrated the artist’s boundless affinity with nature and the natural environment. This exhibition included works that further demonstrated the artist’s use of two dominant yet distinct mediums. As well as the artist’s more traditional painting style using acrylic in heavily sculpted and gestural impasto, Hong Yi’s Flowerbed series was painstakingly produced with individually folded origami rice-paper flowers covered in colour-shifting layers of pigments and acrylic. 

Zhuang Hong Yi took Unit London by storm with his most recent solo show, Earth. This exhibition displayed a breathtaking collection of pieces, including his signature flowerbeds. Hong Yi’s choice of motif is hardly coincidental – flowers symbolise growth and are rooted in a markedly Eastern influence…