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ZHUONG HONG YI : PAINTINGS AND FLOWERBEDS

536 views · Published 9 May 2013 · 4:48 · Indexed 23 October 2026

Channel: ERIC MINH SWENSON ART FILMS · 2013 · Howto & Style

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Film by Eric Minh Swenson

Leslie Sacks Contemporary is excited to announce an exhibition of mixed
media paintings by Zhuang Hong Yi. Originally from Sichuan, China, Zhuang
has lived in Groningen, the Netherlands for over twenty years. This
exhibition will include collaged rice paper, mixed media flowerbeds and
paintings, which explore Zhuang¹s personal pursuit to meld Eastern and
Western aesthetics, materials and artistic practices.

The flower motif dominates Zhuang¹s work. He works patiently and
religiously year after year on this subject alone. In Chinese culture the
flower is a significant image, which carries with it countless meanings,
emotions and symbols.  Zhuang¹s mixed media flowerbeds are crafted from
delicate pieces of painted rice paper, which the artist has bent and
folded into hundreds of tiny buds. Utilizing a traditional Chinese
material, the works also represent traditional Chinese aesthetics: they
are meditations on color, nature and form. The emphasis on technique and
uniformity, and the focus on the artist¹s handling of material are all
lessons Zhuang adopted from the Sichuan College of Fine Arts, where he
first studied. Intricately crafted with care and forethought, the
seductive, tactile quality of the flowers is highlighted in these works.

The canvas paintings bear the influence of Impressionism and other Western
artistic practices. Zhuang¹s impasto brushstroke is expressive and
unconfined. The regularity of form and structure is undone, colors melt
together, and paint drips down the canvas, seeping over a collage of
delicately unfolded rice paper flowers. The works¹ almost sculptural
three-dimensionality makes it both painting and object. Messiness, variety
and chance are all embraced, evidencing Zhuang¹s liberation in terms of
both aesthetics and technique. Like the flowerbed works, these paintings
draw the viewer in, encouraging contemplation as they immerse us in a
tapestry of color and form.

Zhuang¹s work is built upon his native country¹s well-established artistic
traditions and boundaries, which he has married with the Netherlands¹
encouragement of freedom of style. Embracing his present without losing
his past and he is attempting to define a sense of self that exists
between the two. This is the personal struggle that Zhuang enacts visually
and through his artistic process, which vacillates between phases of
controlled planning, emotional gesture, and careful editing. The result is
objects of appealing beauty, mysterious and alluring‹at once both foreign
and familiar.

Zhuang Hong Yi has exhibited in China and throughout Europe including
Germany, the Netherlands, France and Spain. He has been the subject of
multiple museum exhibitions at Groninger Museum, Groningen, the
Netherlands. His work is held in numerous esteemed public and private
collections worldwide. This will mark Zhuang¹s second U.S. gallery
exhibition, his first on the West Coast.

For more info on Eric Minh Swenson or project inquiries visit his website : www.thuvanarts.com
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