If she was anyone else, mixed-media artist Red Hong Yi would be in therapy for extreme OCD issues.
Thankfully, Red’s been afforded the public spotlight for her obsession with creating art with things we’d ordinarily dismiss as being decidedly un-artistic: coffee stains, peanuts, chopsticks (like when she made Jackie Chan a portrait for his birthday) … and now, teabags. Twenty thousand of them.
Her latest piece, titled Teh Tarik Man, is made out of 20,000 drained or partially drained teabags to form a portrait of that most Malaysian of heros, the man making your favourite mug of teh tarik at your breakfast mamak stall of choice.
The piece was commissioned for the Malaysian cultural showcase at the recent World Economic Forum on January 24 in Davos, Switzerland.
Explaining her choice of subject matter, Red said the teh tarik was a reflection of shared Malaysian culture, a drink for which “locals gather in kopitiams and mamak (shops), and here they talk about where to buy the best durians, the traffic, politics, weather and soccer.
“It is a drink that brings people together and I hope that I am able to share a bit of my country’s culture through this piece,” she said.
