"I Will Never Fall in Love" by Gerald Ko & "Tea Bag Artwork" by me!

Threw in a bunch of photos - I'm in Malaysia now and am heading to the airport now, going back to Shanghai. Will edit this post once I get there - this is just a rough post! Feel free to leave comments though :)

Collaboration: Singer + Artist = ?

Storyline:

The story is about how Boy meets Girl, and Boy falls in love but a way that's different from most relationships - everything that can go wrong goes wrong when he asks her out. The video starts with Boy meeting Girl for the first time in a cafe when she serves him a cup of tea. Being too shy to verbally ask her out, Boy writes little notes to her on tea bag labels instead. Girl agrees to go out but every date is unsuccessful - Boy spills drink onto her, topples popcorn in cinema over her, forgets to bring cash at dinner and slams the door into her face. Girl finally says no to Boy, who then decides to take a box of tea bags and write out his thoughts on each label before giving it to her. Girl - who from the start has a soft spot for him - thinks about their relationship and decides to use the tea bags to surprise Boy at the end by creating a portrait of him, showing Boy that she feels the same way about him too.

So one day as I was making tea, the tea bag label dangling off my cup caught my attention...I thought it was cute and tiny - perfect for writing little secret love notes! Then I thought: how would it look like when tied to a few other labels? How about THOUSANDS of labels? Hold on wait...what if I could make a story about this!? How about a LOVE STORY!?! *sips tea excitedly and starts thinking*

I had the opportunity to work with my friend and amazing singer/songwriter Gerald Ko - who is also the first Youtube singer I started listening to! We discussed how a singer and an artist could collaborate, brainstormed through the story across oceans - him in LA, me in Shanghai (isn't the internet amazing?!) and we put this video together when I was in California last month for the EG conference.

THIS WAS MEANT TO BE A SAD SAD CHINESE SONG! I drew out the storyboard and sent it to Gerald and the team, the original one's here below! We changed the song from a sad to an upbeat one A DAY before the shoot :p

Inspiration came one day at work when I was researching on these two building facades.

Testing it out on the computer!

Thanks so much to the amaaazing crew behind this project - Moses Pan, Maria Takaoka, Jon Wang and their team (see credits) - I was just expecting one person with a camera to help us film, but a WHOLE TEAM turned up! I'm SO glad I got to know you guys this trip - you guys are awesome! And for a special appearance by Jason Chen & Jessica who acted as my boba-making co-worker!

Zhang Yimou portrait...made of bamboo sticks, pins and...socks?!

This project has been featured on Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal...super honoured and grateful! :)

When I first moved to Shanghai, I stumbled upon an old residential alleyway and saw bamboo sticks poking out of windows with laundry hanging onto them, waving in the air.

I thought that was an incredibly beautiful sight. And the amazing thing is seeing something so traditional in a modern, bustling city like Shanghai. That inspired me to do a project in the old residential area that I live at, and I wanted to use materials that local residents are familiar with, but arrange and install them in a different way.

I thought that Zhang Yimou's portrait would be perfect for this project. Zhang Yimou is a famous Chinese film director, who directed the movies Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower, and also was the art director for the Beijing Olympics. Many of his movies reflect the beauty of the Chinese culture, through the use of bamboos and traditional costumes.

The initial idea was to collect LOTS of shirts and hang them up with many bamboo poles but I found shirts really hard to manipulate - they're too big and I figured out that they project would blow my budget as well.  I ended up using the smallest piece of clothing item I could find - socks. I used 750 pairs of socks and found an interesting way to pin the socks together, creating a diamond-shaped piece of skin. It was interesting to see the different angles of shadows cast on it throughout the day.

Chinese film director Zhang Yimou.

Laundry hung out to dry on bamboo sticks.

I thought this was an amazing site - this is a little laneway near where I stay...it was a sunny day and residents hung lots of laundry out to dry...

Inspired by Zhang Yimou's work - he shows lots of bamboos in his movies, and I love the traditional Chinese costumes his characters wear as well...

One day while wandering around, I saw this and thought, "Why not use socks instead of shirts!?"

My awesome colleagues at HASSELL helped me pin all 750 pairs of socks together!

Pinning the socks onto a bamboo pole...

Installing the piece...underestimated how heavy this piece was!

Neighbours and friends came over to help

Dad's sketch helped me overcome my problem of the piece being horribly distorted!

SO relieved and happy that it held up and actually looked like his face! Worked so hard for this, for over 3 weeks :)

It turned out to be a community project - my neighbours came to help and it was VERY chaotic and noisy - everyone was telling me what to do and helping me move stuff around, which honestly was pretty annoying at the start - but throughout the day I realised it was beautiful seeing the community come together, excited to complete this project together. Am so grateful for their help and I loved getting to know them so much better as well!

Oh, an update!

Helloooo everybody :)

Life's been crazy hectic lately - I'm juggling full-time work, trying to finish up two art projects, AND preparing for a conference in the States in mid-April!

This is how a typical day in my life this month looks like:
7.30am - alarm rings. hit snooze
7.30-8.30am - hit snooze a few more times
8.30am - jump out of bed, wash up, get dressed quickly, catch a bus/taxi, get makeup done in bus/taxi (with people staring).
9.30am - get to work. down coffee to kickstart my day
9.45am - 6pm - design buildings around China and attend meetings...I'm working on a commercial and residential tower project in Kun Ming. I try my best to converse in Mandarin in the office (one of the reasons I'm in China is to improve my Mandarin!)
6-7pm - dinner! Today I had xiao long baos. Hopefully I don't end up looking like one
7pm-?? - art projects!

I'll be taking two months off work, starting next Monday, and I can't wait to slow down a bit and get some rest. So why am I taking time off work...? That's coz I've been invited to speak at the EG Conference in the States! :)

EG Conference 'trailer'

I'm very very very honoured to be invited as one of the 60 presenters in the 6th E.G. Conference in Monterey, California, which will be on the 12-14th April. I'm super excited to be meeting many highly qualified and talented people who will be present at the conference... and then there's me, the circus freak show performer from Borneo, haha.

I still can't believe all this is happening, and I'm truly grateful for all the encouraging comments and support I've received in the last few months.

Here's a link to the list of presenters this year: http://www.the-eg.com/presenters

I'll be keeping this post short as I'm still working on my art project right now.

I can't wait to go to the States...the last time I was there, I was 11! I'll be traveling with my mum for a month, from San Francisco to Los Angeles to New York (which I haven't been...omgosh I can't wait to see some of the architecture there in person!!!)!  And oh - speaking of my mum - I thought I'd let you know that she keeps a blog too... she blogs about food, and updates waaaay more often than I do! Here's her blog: http://hungerhunger.blogspot.com/

Have a great week :)
x
Red

Jay Chou Coffee Stain Portrait

This project was inspired by the opening and closing lines in Jay Chou's song, 'Secret/不能说的秘密'. The opening line is about lifting a coffee cup off the saucer, "冷咖啡离开了杯垫" . The ending line of the song is about autumn leaves and fragmented pieces, "飘落后才发现 这幸福的碎片, 要我怎么捡?". Hundreds of individual coffee stain rings, many of them broken and imperfect like fallen autumn leaves, form a whole portrait. 


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. My painting is meant to look like a sepia-toned old photograph to capture the essence of this story.


The project took about 12 hours to finish. Coffee is quite a challenging medium to use - too little water and the rings wouldn't form easily, too much water and the rings would blend into each other, resulting in just a deformed pool of coffee. I had to also wait for the lighter parts too dry up before stamping on the darker rings, or else the rings would not be visible.

As a little kid, I dreamt of becoming an artist. Thank you for the encouraging comments everyone. I cherish every single one.


All glory to God,
Red :)


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All articles on this project placed under the MEDIA tab here!

HOLY MACARONI

Okay, this is getting a liiiiittle crazy!

I was told yesterday morning that my Yao Ming portrait video was featured on Gizmodo, and I thought, 'hey...they're a very well-known site, right?'. I called one of my techie friends and he sounded way more excited than me, and told me that 'they're not big; they're HUGE!'.

Next thing I knew, my views shot up from 12k to 50k in a matter of a few hours, and the video was featured on the Huffington Post and Yahoo and NBC! I couldn't wrap my head around what was gong on before my eyes. The next crazy thing: Good Morning America and ABC news contacted me to request permission to show the video on their channels! I'm totally blown away by the power of social media. All I did was shared my youtube link on my facebook page, and the rest happened from there. I was totally not expecting this - I'm really overwhelmed and extremely nervous - I'm getting mostly good, but some bad (and rude!) comments - and I guess I have to realise I can't please everyone!

I am so so so thankful for the encouragements, comments, video-sharing and emails...I'm really blessed by you, and by God. Thank you!

Yours,
RED! :)

ps: I've placed all the media articles under the tab MEDIA on the top of my site! 
pps: I wish I worked on my dribbling skills more - this was shown on some ESPN and NBA sites and viewers were laughing about my sloppy dribbling towards the end, haha
ppps: would love to stay connected! Here's my Facebook page!