PRESS – Lily Honglei

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“We loosely reinterpret this story to depict a couple in traditional operatic costumes, wandering around New York City at night,” Yang told Hyperallergic. “The contrast between the characters and the metropolitan landscapes, such as Times Square, 7 Train station in Queens, and Brooklyn Bridge, visualizes the cultural isolation they experience and the long journey leading them to a new identity.”

Another banner, titled “The Stereotype: Life of the Invisibles,” honors the multitudinous lives led by Lao Liu, a friend of Lily & Honglei’s. The animation uses a large-scale oil painting series as its source material, and was motivated by Honglei Li’s own experiences both laboring as a curbside artist at Times Square and bearing witness to the difficult lives and deaths of people he has known. Liu worked a number of diverse jobs, including on a vegetable farm upstate, a nail salon, a restaurant, and on a construction site. When he was pursued by police officers for working without a permit in construction, he was treated brutally and left with a broken hand. Unable to continue working in construction, he began picking up bottles and cans in the streets to recycle. “That’s the last thing we knew about him,” Yang says. “We lost him.”
Scan These Artworks and They Will Come to Life, by Jasmine Liu at Hyperallergic

String Together: A Conversation with Lily & Honglei – an interview by Ya Yun Deng, NYFA

Lily Honglei, Chinese American, Asian American, AAPI, Chinatown, Public art, augmented reality art, socially engaged art, Asian American artist,

Amp Magazine by Asian American Artist Alliance – an interview by Shannon Lee

Lily Honglei, Asian American Artist Alliance, Asian American artists, interdisciplinary art, socially engaged art, augmented reality art, Chinese American artist, Asian cultural heritage

A comprehensive interview on Lily & Honglei’s recent work.

601 Artspace & Korea Art Forum

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Lily & Honglei is an immigrant artist collaborative whose practice integrates Asian cultural heritages, traditional art mediums, and emerging technologies. Their work The Red String: Life of the Invisibles (2022) is inspired by “The Butterfly Lovers,” an ancient Chinese folktale, and reflects Asian immigrants’ cultural heritage and their search for a new identity in the western metropolis.