Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Ren Ri Creates Fascinating Geometric Sculptures with the Help of Bees

Chinese artist and beekeeper Ren Ri collaborates with the stinging, black-and-yellow insects to create sculptures catalyzed by natural processes. The artist builds geometric, plastic forms and plants the queen bee in the center before introducing the rest of the hive. The bees naturally build their habitat around the wooden sticks inside of structure, creating organic, irregular shapes that contrast with the pristine plastic prisms that encase them.

Chinese artist and beekeeper Ren Ri collaborates with the stinging, black-and-yellow insects to create sculptures catalyzed by natural processes. The artist builds geometric, plastic forms and plants the queen bee in the center before introducing the rest of the hive. The bees naturally build their habitat around the wooden sticks inside of structure, creating organic, irregular shapes that contrast with the pristine plastic prisms that encase them.

Though the artist explained that his reason for working with bees was to remove his own subjectivity, he rotates the plastic polyhedrons every seven days (a deliberate biblical reference) to alter the growth of the honeycombs. The sculptures are part of Ren’s ongoing series “Yuansu,” which involves other bee-related projects, such as a performance art piece where he allows bees to sting his face as well as a map series made of bees wax. Throughout “Yuansu,” Ren investigates the relationship between humans and bees — a pertinent topic as the declining bee population threatens to have a devastating impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.

Photos by Alessando De Toni.

Meta
Topics
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Separately, each artificial nail used by South African artist Frances Goodman is a temporary, expendable object. But when the artist combines them into a single sculpture, she depicts living, “bodily forms” that defy their nature. “Some of the sculptures are abstract and consider ideas of oozing, spreading, and writhing,” the artist says, in a statement. “Others suggest snakes and scaled creatures.”
AJ Fosik, a self-described "sawdust provocateur," crafts wooden sculptures that appear as totem-like beasts, extending from the wall with a spiritual vibrancy. The artist counts taxidermy, rituals from varying cultures, and folk art as influences in these pieces. The nature of how the pieces stand or are mounted to walls, in particular, references taxidermic practices. His work adorned the cover of Hi-Fructose Vol. 18.
Maud Vantours explores the infinite possibilities of paper with her elaborate 3D sculptures, which turn a seemingly ordinary material into extraordinary art. Her meticulous process involves carefully hand cutting and superimposing layers of paper onto one another to create multidimensional objects that are rich in texture and volume.
Specializing in the Japanese art form of paper architecture, Amsterdam-based artist Ingrid Siliakus creates incredibly detailed architectural masterpieces from single pieces of paper. In order to achieve a final result with the complexity and beauty that she intends, Siliakus may produce anywhere from 20 to over 30 prototypes: “Paper architecture does not bare haste, it is its enemy,” she says. “One moment of loss of concentration can lead to failure of a piece.”

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List