How to Combine Art, Music, and Coffee All at Once
Don’t you just love it when you can do several things at once? If I could put coffee, music, and artistic creation together in one step, I would say that my day is complete.
Red Hongyi is known as the artist who “loves to paint, but not with a paintbrush.” Red’s family left Shanghai, China, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, and moved to Malaysia where she was born and raised.
She graduated from a university in Australia, and now runs her own design studio, living and working between Shanghai and Malaysia. Red uses ordinary, often overlooked objects to make beautiful art.
This piece is a Jay Chou portrait made with coffee cup stains! Red said was inspired by the opening lyrics in Jay Chou’s song, Secret, about lifting a coffee cup up off a saucer, and the ending of the song about autumn leaves and fragmented pieces.
The video shows how the whole portrait is formed by many individual rings, many of them broken and imperfect like fallen autumn leaves.
The song is from a Taiwanese movie called Secret. The story is about a girl who traveled forward 20 years in time and met Jay in 1999, when they fell in love. She then went back to 1979 and sketched out a portrait of him. Red’s painting is meant to look like a sepia-toned old photograph to capture the essence of the story.
