The Artist with a Cause
Red Hong Yi on her Groundbreaking Art, Multicultural Experiences, and Hopes for the Future
Red Hong Yi is a visionary artist whose work has transcended borders and nationalities. Known as “the artist who paints without a paintbrush,” she creates mixed media pieces with everyday materials and objects to express themes of heritage, identity, and race. Her art has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and TIME Magazine. Red was named one of the Top 11 Art Entrepreneurs to Know and was recently named one of Asia’s Most Influential Voices.
I sat down with Red to discuss her art and her life.
Tell us about the community you grew up in.
I grew up in a small city in Malaysia. The city I’m from is on Borneo Island. Borneo is an island with three countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. We’re kinda out here living our own island life, so it’s pretty chill and relaxed. I grew up being really outdoorsy — fishing and catching bugs and rolling in the mud quite a bit.
You were born in Malaysia, studied in Australia, and then lived in Shanghai. Walk us through your journey from architect to artist.
Growing up, drawing and art was something I was better at in school, but I thought architecture would be a more stable future for me. It’s a blend of science and art, and I was interested in both. So after high school, I went to Australia to study architecture.
From Malaysia to Australia, the transition was smooth because a lot of Malaysians go to Australia for college, so I felt I was still in the Malaysian community there. I thought that would be my life and I’d be living there forever. Low and behold, the economy downturned in 2009 and 2010, and there were hardly any construction jobs. I couldn’t find a job there at the time, so I applied to 200 companies around the world. Most of the replies came from Asia, so after college, I took a job up in Shanghai as an architect. Funny enough, although ethnicity wise I’m Asian, I felt that there was a bigger cultural shock going to Shanghai. I remember the first time I took a bus, I had to push to get in. I was pushed out because I wasn’t aggressive enough. (laughs) It was funny to go through these different things. To live in China, you kind of have to have a sort of sense of humor. Everything was different from what I knew.
But I was charmed by the city despite its chaos. It felt like a city in transition.
When I started to do art on the side, I stayed in my architecture firm. I didn’t take up these projects until a bigger project came in. It was Hewlett Packard that contacted me. They wanted me to create a piece for their 30 second commercial that was going to be aired in countries across Asia. I was like Whoa, someone is paying me for art? The fees were pretty good, and I realized I could get paid a decent amount for this.
At that time, my boss of the architecture firm sat down with me. I thought, He knows what I’m doing at the side. I’m going to get fired. But to my surprise, he was super encouraging, telling me to go to where my art led me. He encouraged me to give it a try for six months, and if it didn’t work, I could come back to his company. I had the right boss at the right time. He provided me that safety net, and that was really what pushed me.
I noticed that people were doing amazing things, but weren’t known outside of China. My Chinese colleagues didn’t know what was happening outside of China too, so it was both ways.
I wanted to bridge and humanize personalities in China and also show my friends outside of China what was happening.
I gave myself the project of creating portraits and I wanted to story tell through materials that represented people. My first project was Ai Wei Wei, a controversial Chinese artist who wasn’t in the media a lot. But the art world labeled him as the most powerful artist in the world at the time because he was doing a lot of art that talked about what was going on in China. He’s known for a piece called Sunflower Seeds, and it’s 100 million sunflower seeds laid out in a warehouse. So I used sunflower seeds and laid them out into a portrait of him.
The second piece was of Yao Ming, the basketball player. That was the piece that went viral. I used a basketball and red paint and dribbled it around and rendered it into a portrait of Yao Ming. I shot that in time lapse and uploaded it on YouTube. Two weeks later, Gizmodo uploaded it onto their website and then a ton of media followed suit. That was how my career in art started.
What are your thoughts on art and social justice?
Art can be anything that the artist feels like discussing or talking about. I have a team of assistants that help me with my projects, and one of them is a super talented embroidery artist. She came up to me and said, “I really like that you have a message in your work, but I don’t have a message in mine, and I don’t want to. Is that okay?” I told her that it’s totally fine and it’s up to what you feel your role as an artist is. If you want to make beautiful pieces, then that’s a message in itself, that the human spirit can create beautiful pieces.
I’ve always had a little bit of that activist in me.
For me, I think I’ve always had a little bit of that activist in me. But I think earlier in my career, I didn’t want to rock the boat. I was a lot more thin skinned and negative comments would really affect me. But now I’ve grown thicker skin! (laughs)
I’m okay with voicing these things and I think that as a mature artist, I want to use this platform to talk about things that are important to me. In this instance, especially in this season, heritage and race is something that I do want to talk about.
Tell us about your “I am Not a Virus” series. What inspired you to create this series, and how has it evolved since its initial concept?
I had been going back and forth between Malaysia and LA the last couple of years, and I thought I would just move to LA in March this year. Then this quarantine season rained down on us. (laughs) At the time, I was texting a friend (who is Asian) in LA, and asking what was going on. I’m in Malaysia right now, so I don’t see a lot of racism against Asians in Malaysia. I’d been reading articles about racist messages towards Asians because of the virus, and I wanted to know if it was really happening. My friend said she felt that it was a risk going out every time. I also had friends telling me there were assaults happening in Australia. I really started to dig into it, reading articles, and it made me think.
I wanted to create a piece that highlighted this issue. It was super organic, just a portrait of myself with a mask over me. I wanted to use any material that I could find at home, and I found expired matcha leaves. (laughs) So I turned that into an awareness piece. And I was surprised by the reaction that I got.
Instantly, there was a lot more dialogue and comments compared to my previous pieces. People are really discussing my pieces.
It’s resonating with a lot of people, especially the Asian community. And I also had a couple of DMs from non-Asians going Oh, I didn’t know this was happening. Thanks for highlighting this. That made me realize that we are very aware of what’s happening within our community and probably not outside of it.
So I continued creating the series. I covered actual victims of assault and also voices that have come out. Examples are a two year old in Texas that was stabbed, a Singaporean student in London who was punched in the face, Amanda Nguyen who came out to talk about this, and George Takei who has also been vocal. So yeah, this whole series has been incredibly meaningful.
Tell us about your newest work of art, the “I am Not a Virus” bamboo weaving. What was the ideation process like for you?
After the smaller series made of food materials, I felt like it was timely to create these pieces during quarantine. I wanted a piece where I was able to look back and go wow, that was what we were going through. I wanted to collect newspaper clippings that discussed these issues.
I’d been working with bamboo in the past year, and I thought, maybe I should transfer this to bamboo pieces. I have a couple mats in my studio that were already made. Then I decided to burn the portraits of victims of assaults and put them on the bamboo and weaved in the newspaper clippings of the assaults that had happened to these people.
Which piece was the most challenging for you to create?
In the past, I created a portrait of Jackie Chan. There’s also another portrait of a person making pulled tea. Those two were the most challenging ones because they were super laborious. It was like, 20,000 tea bags or 60,000 chopsticks, oh my gosh. (laughs)
I assembled a team of about 20 people for those. That’s when I realized I couldn’t do it by myself. For both projects, I was given the timeline of two months to create it. So the first month was concept and making sure the client was happy with it. And then followed by another month of tying things together and really making things.
The tough bit was not the concept or creating the image. It was more about the mental roller coaster of doing the same thing everyday.
Where do you draw inspiration from? Who are your favorite artists?
I draw inspiration from people like Shepard Fairey, who has a whole platform of portraits that talks about social justice and honors front liners. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from his work at this time.
In terms of methods, I like this Chinese artist named Caiguo Qiang. He’s created these crazy pieces made of gun powder, so they explode in midair and they explode into the canvas. My burnt pieces are like a mild version of what he’s done. He’s pretty badass, and I like his work.
Ai Wei Wei also inspired me quite a bit. He’s done a lot of political pieces, although sometimes he tries to ruffle feathers. (laughs) He uses objects as well, similar to mine.
I also draw inspiration from artists from the American black community. They talk about issues like identity and politics. Artists like Kara Walker, who creates paper silhouettes that talk about what they’re going through as a community.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced as an Asian woman?
A year after I quit my job to pursue art, when I was first discovered for my work, I was featured on media for a bit. I had an acquaintance come up to me and tell me that I’m only noticed because of the way I look. It was something along the lines of if he created the same pieces, he wouldn’t be noticed.
I felt that my skills and what I worked hard for was put down. That has happened two or three times in my career, but that was the only time someone had told me that to my face. That shows insecurity on their parts, and I refuse to believe that. It really affected me early on in my career, but now I’m like No, I am an Asian woman that creates amazing pieces and has a great career.
Any final thoughts?
There has not been a better time than now to be Asian or Asian American. There are more and more voices, like Watercress, to discuss issues and stories of heritage and culture. I think it’s even more important to come together to use our voices now.
I hope that my role as an Asian woman will empower other Asian women to believe in who they are, be proud of who they are, be proud of their heritage and gender, and pursue their dreams and goals wholeheartedly.
Follow Red’s Instagram @redhongyi.
