Zhuang Hong Yi

Monica Blignaut
Feb 16, 2021
2 min read

Artist 293

Zhuang Hong Yi

Flower Landscapes

Painting

Zhuang Hong Yi (born 1962) is a Chinese-Dutch artist who lives in the Netherlands and Beijing. Hong Yi is know to work in two dominant yet distinct mediums, creating what can be described as 3-dimensional paintings.

He makes his work with many traditional Chinese materials, including ink, rice paper, porcelain, and wood. About his work, “you see the flowers, it’s like you are looking at them from the sky,” Zhuang has said. “And when you see flower fields in Holland, you cannot forget about it. I told myself I had to reproduce it… for me, it’s like meditation.”

His Flowerbed series is produced through painstakingly folded origami rice-paper flowers covered in colour-shifting layers of acrylic and oil paint.

Hong Yi also implements a more traditional painterly approach, applying acrylic in heavily sculpted and gestural impasto with unfolded rice-paper flowers.

The flower motif dominates Zhuang Hong Yi's work - a significant image in Chinese culture which carries countless meanings and emotions yet with equally strong associations with the Netherlands, world famous for its flowers - and he works patiently and religiously on this subject year after year, intricately crafting his works with care and forethought.

“My art is about happiness, enrichment, and re-enchantment. Today there is so much negativity and pain in the world; I want people to feel joy by reconnecting them with the calmness of nature. It’s why the flower is so dominant in my paintings. Flowers are a universal and unifying symbol for peace and prosperity.”