Sandra Bussière Hong Merchant

Biography
Main Exhibitions
Artwork

Biography

Sandra Bussiere lives in the south of France but has a worldly influence for her art. Her daily walks through Shanghai’s Lilongs, Bussiere found herself totally immersed into the atmosphere reflected by the time-work brick walls, some bearing unreadable signs. Altogether, fascinating, disorientating and the ideograms cast in an iron slab, shining out in a tangle of luminous graphics and calligraphy makes her art more unique than ever. Sandra has taken the parts of Shanghai that many of us overlook, she’s looked at the manholes in the street, the aspects of the roadway and the subway, all things we overlook daily she has highlighted through her art. She calls these creations her “imprints of the city;” they are a cast iron plate, carrying a faint trace of those signs, detached, delicate as a petal, glued flat onto the linen canvas. She breaks down the structure or composition of the city and blends it into the washed out ink or acrylic paint. She’ll get lost in the timeworn surface of a brick wall or by scanning a huge crowd when the offices let the workers out. She draws inspiration from some of Shanghai’s old Chinese quarters, studying the lifestyle and the contrast between the old and new. Her depiction of a manhole on the street is perhaps the best example what she does. "Charged with black or red my brush vigorously stamps and paints the delicate sheet of rice paper, whose pure whiteness clashes with the grey asphalt where I am kneeling. A slight breeze disturbs the papers that I have pinned down with lumps of wood. I am so concentrated that I no longer hear the noises of the street nor the whispering all around me." Sandra then takes it back to her studio, the imprint of that cast iron plate, carrying a faint trace of those sights, detached, delicate as a petal on her rice paper it will now fly off to a new directions. Glued onto a flat canvas, it will punctuate or structure the composition, blend into the washed out ink or acrylic paint or even link itself to other pictorial elements and other kinds of light. This is the adventure of creative thinking in the studio but without barriers, without limits, this is Sandra’s way.