A climate-change featured by Malaysian contemporary artist Red Hong Yi made it to the cover of the latest Time Magazine issue.
A stellar achievement for the Sabahan, who created a 2.3m x 3m world map covered by 50,000 green-tipped matchsticks. The green matchsticks as you may have guessed symbolised trees, which were later set alight to highlight how climate change is destroying the world.
The 50,000 green-tipped matchstick World Map – Image from Instagram
Red through her Instagram page, thanked her six-member team for the project.
“I can’t thank this amazing crew enough for doing such an outstanding job at creating and capturing the making and destruction of the art project for @time.
“I’m also very proud to have created it with a whole crew of talented and dedicated Malaysians!
These behind-the-scenes photos were taken by the awesome @jessielyee_ for @time’s “Climate is Everything” issue.”
As the fire burned, she said on her IG, “Here’s what it looked like when we burnt the artwork in real time. In the end, everything was burnt – except Hawaii and New Zealand. Now we all know where to move to! 😅”
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Red also noted that they took several safety precautions before lighting up the matchsticks for the shoot. They spent two weeks sticking matchsticks non-stop for eight hours a day, and then we watched the piece burn down in two minutes.
“The challenge behind this is that we knew this would blow up. It’s made of matchsticks. So we made sure that safety measures were in place. We also sprayed fire-retardant paint on the board. There were firefighters on standby.”
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Red began her career as an architect and received her Master of Architecture degree from the University of Melbourne.
Her art has been shown at H Queens in Hong Kong, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, World Economic Forum in Davos, Anchorage Museum in Alaska and JP Morgan Chase Bank, to name a few.
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