Artist Ye Wuqu / 叶无趣 (72299592): Proof That a Hand Made It
Two bananas lie on a wooden desk, clear as glass. You can see the grain of the wood through them, bent by their curves, and thin white lines of light run along their ridges. Then a hand picks one up and peels it. Under the “glass” is an ordinary banana, pale and soft. The glass was paint — painted straight onto the skin of a real banana.
The Artist
叶无趣 — Ye Wuqu, roughly “Ye the Uninteresting” — is a Chinese artist whose own description of his work is a single short phrase: 分享绘画过程, sharing the process of painting. The name is a joke. His work is anything but uninteresting.
He works in two very different ways. One is careful, slow colored pencil on paper: film and game characters, a fluffy owl, hand-drawn playing cards, a whole grid of app icons. The other is illusion — paint applied to real objects so that they look like something they are not. A banana becomes glass. A plaster head becomes crystal. A plain ball becomes a clear glass sphere. In both, he shows every stage, from the bare object to the last stroke.
Painting Glass Onto Things
Glass is one of the hardest things to paint, because it has no color of its own. What you see is the world behind it, bent and squeezed by its curves; dark lines where the surface turns steeply away; and a few small, hard flashes where light bounces off. Painting it on flat paper is difficult enough. Ye Wuqu paints it onto solid objects, which means the paint has to show what would be visible through an object that is, in fact, not transparent at all.
The banana shows how. First, a base coat over the yellow skin in a pale, warm gray, so the real color disappears. Then the desk is painted onto the banana: the grain of the wood, curved along the fruit and slightly out of line with the real grain around it. Darker gray goes along the edges where a glass curve would turn away from the eye. Last, thin lines of white along the ridges, sharp and clean. Then the reveal: he picks it up and peels it.
A Crystal David
The same trick works on a plaster bust of Michelangelo’s David. The bust starts pure white. He paints it with grays, blacks and whites until it looks cast in clear crystal: the curls of the hair become a cluster of bright facets, the face shows the darker shapes of the room behind it, and the edges of the nose, brow and lips are traced with fine white highlights. The plaster never changes shape. Only the paint makes it seem transparent.
The Slow Way: Colored Pencil
His colored pencil work is the opposite of a trick. Judy and Nick from Zootopia are drawn side by side, with a neat row of sharpened pencils laid on the desk beside the paper. Judy’s face is built from soft gray fur, the strands drawn one by one, with large violet eyes and a bright highlight in each. Nick’s orange fur is warmer and coarser, and the city behind them is drawn in soft pinks and blues so it stays behind the characters.
He has drawn Homelander from The Boys, a fluffy owl, and portraits on unusual surfaces — including, for his girlfriend, a portrait of her favorite singer, Jay Chou, painted on a thermos cup.
A Glass Ball That Isn’t
The glass sphere starts as a plain ball on a wooden table. He covers it with paint using a palette knife, then paints into it what a clear sphere would show: the wood of the table, curved and squeezed as a lens would bend it, growing darker toward the rim. A few spots of white for the window reflections, and it looks like solid glass. Then he picks it up.
He has called it a glass ball “with a limited-edition background”: the illusion only works on that table, because what is painted inside it is that particular table.
A Wall of Icons
One of his longest pieces is also one of the simplest. On a single white sheet, he draws app icons for popular mobile games, one at a time, in colored pencil: each a small rounded square, with a character’s face, a logo, a burst of color. The grid fills row by row, until the sheet looks like the home screen of a phone. It is a test of patience and precision rather than of illusion: dozens of tiny pictures, each one complete.
Pictures That Change
Many of his other pieces only work in motion. A picture painted with fire. A picture that disappears when fire touches it. A drawing that glows when the light goes off. A sheet that shows one image from the front and another from the back. A small world painted inside a ball.
One is an anime girl drawn across a sheet in vertical strips — a little of one picture, a little of another, alternating. When the sheet is folded like a fan, it shows one image from the left and a different one from the right. Several of these pieces were made for game companies, as hand-drawn collaborations.
Why the Hand Stays in the Picture
For centuries, realist painters tried to hide the work, so that the finished picture looked as if no one had made it. Ye Wuqu does the opposite. Every piece shows the plain object, the tools and every step, so the reveal at the end is earned: you watched it being made, and it still fooled you.
That is the real subject. Not the glass, but the fact that a person with a brush and some jars of paint made you believe in it.
See his work on Douyin: 叶无趣 (72299592) · glass banana · crystal David · glass ball · Judy and Nick. All artwork and video © 叶无趣, shown with credit.