YE HONGXING
STICKING IT TO SOCIETY

Stickers are often seen as playful, colorful decorations that bring a touch of fun to everyday objects like water bottles, laptops, cars, and children's activity books. They add personality and charm, whether it's a cute character on a notebook or a funny phrase on a car bumper. But in the hands of contemporary artist Ye Hongxing, these seemingly simple, mass-produced stickers transform into much more than just embellishments.
  

The stickers she uses come from all over including the Chinese Sticker market and commercial stores in the United States like the ones you might pick up at Michaels or Hobby Lobby. These stores have stickers in every shape, size, and color, making them perfect for creating all sorts of imaginative works. While the stickers themselves might be everyday items, the artwork Hongxing creates with them is anything but ordinary.


Hongxing began using stickers in her work in 2009. Since then, she has used stickers to explore Eastern and Western themes of consumerism, pop culture, and humanity’s relationship to the natural world. In one of her most striking pieces, Red Boat, she reflects on Chinese society in the year 2022. The stickers of people, animals, war machines, and culture overlap, and weave together a mesh of stories on top of one another.  The result is a visual explosion of information that demands the viewer's attention, a tangled web of images that mirrors the complexity of the world we live in. 


For Hongxing, stickers are the perfect tool to represent this complexity. As she explains, “The fragmented composition of stickers reinforces the virtual and disjointed characteristics of my pieces.” After all, what better way to capture the chaotic, multi-layered aspects of society than with a bunch of versatile stickers?