Thursday, February 23, 2012

Coffee Cup Stain Portrait by Hong Yi

Malaysian artist Hong Yi uses all sorts of unconventional objects to create portraits. Recently, she created a huge portrait of Taiwanese musician Jay Chou by staining the canvas with a coffee cup.
The 26 year old artist drew inspiration for the portrait from one of the Chou’s songs “Secret”, whose opening lines is about lifting a coffee cup off the saucer. The ending line of the song is about autumn leaves and fragmented pieces. The singer tells a heartbreak tale of a lost romance with a girl from 1979 who time-traveled forward 20 years and met Jay in 1999, and they fell in love. She then went back to 1979 and sketched a portrait of him.
Hong Yi’s portrait consist of hundreds of individual coffee stain rings, many of them broken and imperfect like fallen autumn leaves, to form a whole portrait. 
“Coffee is quite a challenging medium to use,” she said. “Too much water and the rings wouldn't form easily, too little water and the rings will be too light. I had to be precise with where to place the cup because the rings would be permanent.”
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