I was amazed when I saw an instavideo yesterday and intrigue by his art.
Meet Li Hongbo
A former book editor and designer, trained in a variety of artistic fields from Fine to Folk and Experimental art. Li Hongbo plays with the appearances and connotations of paper. The material is to him an endless source of inspiration and interpretation. Li Hongbo observed that honeycomb paper is a folk art present in many aspects of life in China, from children's toys to festive decorations. Dismantling one such object, he discovered now simply it is made and the mazing flexibility, resilience and strength of the paper material once buit into layers of hexagonal cubes. The artist reproduces the mechanical process manually, making it a painstaking craft which requires a whole new level of perfection to achieve the machine made rendering. The thousands of layers of brown paper are cut, folded and glue together to look like what they originated from: wood. The artist then carves the blok of paper as if he was sculpting wood. Common brown paper, usually associated with wrapping and meant to be discarded,is them interpreted in shapes of much more valued objects, such as a pair of porcelain vases or even human figures, to give it a whole new significance.
http://www.schoeniartgallery.com/artists/178-Li-Hongbo/overview/
