We have often looked at aggregates and assemblages of materials as inspirations. But it is always intriguing to go back to this theme and keep on finding artists who create such works using unusual materials. Chinese artist Ye Hongxing employed for example in her 2014 piece entitled "Carnival", multi-coloured toys, proving you can elevate even abandoned plastic toys to artworks.
In that piece the artist – born in 1972, based in Beijing and considered as one of China's top twenty rising artists – started experimenting with a rather unusual material -children's stickers.
As the years passed, Ye Hongxing mastered this technique: the artist has currently got a virtual exhibition on Offshoots Arts that includes a variety of works made with this technique.
Seen from a distance her canvases look like colourful compositions, at times showing underwater scenes, animals, flowers and buildings. Yet, close-up, you realise the coloured areas aren't filled with paint, but built using layer upon layer of stickers characterised by the most disparate shapes and colours.
So you may be seeing an orange fish, but, once you refocus, you realise the fish is made with a variety of glossy stickers, in the most disparate shapes – there you can spot a sheep, here a shrimp or a bird, and then a cat and a bunny. Their shapes and colours give life to Ye Hongxing's characters.
The artist uses this medium to celebrate creativity, but also to pose viewers vital questions about the impact human beings have on the environment.
Forced to slow down during this past year because of Coronavirus, we realised that a change is needed in our habits to start reconnecting with the natural world. The forced silence that fell upon our cities and towns with the various lockdowns also allowed nature to return, reopening our eyes to the possibility of living in quieter and less polluted environments.
Hongxing's vast landscapes and precise patterns are the result of a disorganised chaos: densely applied, imaginatively composed and carefully assembled, the stickers represent almost a physical rendition of digital pixels.
Some of her series, such as "Coral Island", are conceived as joyous representations and celebrations of modern life, fragmented mosaics of a modern chaos, with their vividly bright colours and detailed imagery, incorporating references to architecture, nature and fashion as well (look carefully and you will spot the first letters of the "Prada" logo).
Yet there is also another metaphor behind these works: each sticker here contributes to form a new whole, a grand scene, just like in life each individual is a tiny part of a greater whole, so Hongxing's are fantastical representations of the world as we know it and a reflection of one's individual place in society.
This is very symbolic especially in the current historical moment we are living in: those of us living in countries where the vaccine roll out is speedily progressing may be hoping things will go back to normal as soon as possible. But we are all tiny parts of a bigger globalised world and, if we don't make sure that also people living in poorer countries get vaccinated, our efforts will be vain.
Last but not least, while hinting at globalisation, pollution and innocence, the artworks also prompt us to consider how more traditional art mediums went through a radical transformation in our times and how, in this case, the artist opted for cheap children's stickers leaving behind acrylic or oil paint.
Surprisingly, Ye Hongxing still hasn't been co-opted by the fashion world, but give her some time and you will see some of these assemblages turned into a runway installation or even into prints for a fashion collection.
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