For the inaugural show at its new Wardour Street space, Unit London is proud to present RAW, an exhibition of recent works by leading Chinese contemporary artist, Zhuang Hong Yi.

With a celebrated career spanning nearly three decades, Zhuang Hong Yi has achieved international acclaim with works that explore his mixed cultural heritage. Born and raised in Sichuan, China and currently based in between his Rotterdam and Beijing studios, Yi has had over 30 international solo exhibitions and his work has been selected for important shows at major venues including the Found Museum Beijing, China; the Groninger Museum, The Netherlands; and in Venice, Italy in conjunction with the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).

Founding Directors Joe Kennedy and Jonny Burt comment:

“RAW will present a breathtaking new body of work by Zhuang Hong Yi, and will be particularly exciting as it is his first major solo show here in the UK. Zhuang is an internationally renowned and critically-acclaimed artist, and the scale of this exhibition is unlike anything we have previously staged. RAW will present some of Zhuang’s best work to date, and reflects Unit London’s fearless ambition to showcase and celebrate the finest international talent here in the heart of London.”

Yi uses traditional Chinese materials to produce vibrant, textural paintings with strong allusions to the European Impressionist movement. The flower is a recurrent motif throughout Yi’s work, and carries strong cultural resonance in both China and Holland. Central to Yi’s artistic oeuvre, the fascination with the floral form echoes Monet’s own focus of artistic production in the latter years of his life, and one can draw parallels between both artists’ works.

Yi manipulates thousands of rice paper flowers, which he then combines with layers of oil and acrylic to create large-scale fields of petals on canvas that sing with colour. Meditations on nature and form; the bold, sculptural paintings fuse traditional Chinese artistic practices with a contemporary abstract aesthetic.

His work is held in several public and private collections, with notable collectors including Nick Woodham, King Mohammed VI of Morocco, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, the Al Nahyan royal family of Abu Dhabi and Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.