Hong Yi, who goes by the nickname 'Red', is a Malaysian artist-architect. She was given the nickname because her name, Hong, sounds like the word 'red' in Mandarin.
Red's grandparents and father left Shanghai in the '60s during the start of the Cultural Revolution and moved to Sabah, Malaysia where she was born and raised. Growing up, she heard stories about how life was like for them and her relatives in China, but never thought much about it.
Red Hong Yi, Flamingos (Pink gerberias and twigs) 2014
After graduating from university in Australia, she took up an offer to work for Australian architecture firm HASSELL in their Shanghai office, and was completely taken with the city, with its special structures and tensions, its unique history and culture. This inspired her to start on creating art using local everyday materials she found in China as her medium. It was an outlet for her to express how much she felt for a place her grandparents once fled from.
Known as the artist who 'loves to paint, but not with a paintbrush', her works have been featured by media around the world including Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC, CNN, NBC and The Daily Mail. She has worked with clients such as Hewlett Packard, Unilever, Nespresso, and Astro, was invited as a presenter at the 6th and 7th EG Conference in Monterey, California, and lectured in design universities Domus Academy and NABA in Milan, and traveled to USA, Italy, Germany, China, Malaysia, Australia and Hong Kong to present her work. She currently lives and works between Shanghai and Malaysia.
Ysabel LeMay's phantasmagorical nature photographs defy all odds. In a world where nature photography has been done to death, LeMay' creates unique images that radiate with awe.