William Blake wrote about seeing a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Red Hong Yi watches her year-old son gaze in amazement at a crumpled paper and sees things anew.

“This year has been all about my baby and it makes me think like a child,” says the artist. “I want to go back to that kind of simplicity and find inspiration from him. I look at him laughing and have all these thoughts I want to deal with, with my art.”

Motherhood moved her to pick up a brush — she released a book last year on how to paint without one — and do a wall mural, Forest and a Little Sleeping Bear, in his bedroom. Returning to paint after building her forte creating art using common household objects, she found it enjoyable.

“Maybe I should go back to it.”

Forest is the first piece of Hong Yi’s own work in her new home, which she, husband Joe and babe moved into recently. Little bear will not be alone for long as she will add an animal to the painting every year. A rabbit will pop up among the bushes, she shares.

Choosing where to live took the couple a while, with their son the main draw. Eventually, they decided on a three-storey unit in a family-friendly neighbourhood in Kuala Lumpur. “Somewhere safe because we travel quite a bit,” with a park and waterfront nearby, schools, shops and lots of greenery. Traffic can be heavy during peak hours and she will have to schedule her trips out. But there is the tempting idea of working more at home, in the top-floor room that can double as her studio.

“My grand plan for this place is to have art on all the walls. I have realised getting the right space to live informs the way you create art. Because I felt, ‘Oh, maybe this place is more suitable for abstract works’, and I’ve been doing more figurative things,” she says. “All these walls will be filled, I told my husband, with a combination of creations by myself and my friends. If they are all my own things, that would be rather narcissistic.”

She adds: “I have been to a few collectors’ homes. The nice thing about talking to them was finding out why they bought the pieces they collect — maybe it has something to do with the colour palette of the place — and their relationship with the artists. It was kind of like having an artist in the house.”

Looking around her property, Hong Yi points out the original layout had too many walls. She stripped them to extend the kitchen and living area on the ground floor, where a King Living 1977 Sofa set beckons one to tarry. “I really like this because it reminds me of a bear,” she says, feeling the furry cover of one cushy piece.

A bigger kitchen fits in with her plans to jazz up the space around her Cosentino island with bean bags and a rug, where friends can gather when they come over. “I really enjoy plating food and making things look nice. Actually, my parents liked to entertain and I grew up watching them do it.”

The interior of her compact unit is painted mainly beige or peach, for a neutral backdrop against which to show her art. Facing the sofa is a painting of a traditional Chinese vase, painstakingly decorated with floral motifs put together using cracked eggshells.

“This was done in 2019, when I was travelling a lot. I was a bit lost at the time; I didn’t know what to centre on. I hadn’t met my husband yet, so I guess the eggshells kind of represented little broken [bits]. But I wanted to be whole at the same time.”

At the landing on the first level is a striking portrait of her grandaunt, relaxing on an armchair with legs crossed and magnifying glass in hand, to read the newspaper.  Hong Yi did Da Popo — as in “big grandmother because she was my oldest grandaunt” — in 2021 from a photograph, using red calligraphy paper on canvas cut into shape and then burnt.

She had lived with her grandaunt in Shanghai from 2011 to 2012. During Covid, the latter learnt her house would be torn down to make way for development. “When I heard about that and couldn’t go see it for the last time, I wanted to create something to commemorate her life. She lived until 99 and died in 2022.”

There is a balanced mix of old and new in Hong Yi’s home, which has some way to go before it is completely done up. Adjacent to Da Popo is a multi-tier shelf she put together from enamel plates she had used for a project and did not need anymore, a TNB pole cut to serve as pillars, and balustrades from a previous house. The plates are drilled and stacked to support stone slabs from Cosentino’s Earthic series.

After trying out different materials in the earlier part of her career, she hopes “to master only one or two now”. 

“I want them to be like mine, instead of spending time experimenting and researching. I want to take them and go, ‘Okay, I know how this works’.”

Two materials she has in mind are red calligraphy paper and sand, the latter because it brings back memories of going to the beach with her parents and playing with sand castles. “There’s an innocence to sand, so that has to do with my kid too.”

This year, she has been busy with various projects, including an installation for HSBC made of 15,000 coins dipped in red paint to create images of bunga raya. When completed, it will hang at the bank’s head office at Tun Razak Exchange in Kuala Lumpur.

After the commissions are done and delivered, she wants to focus on creating art for herself. Her walls should be ready by then. With Hong Yi watching her son as she works at home, those who follow her creative journey can expect to see the world afresh through the eyes of  mother and child.

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