American artist Maya Hayuk has a mission to express the spring/summer 2010 theme, Style Revolution, for Beijing's Lane Crawford.
Fashionistas who went window-shopping in Beijing's Lane Crawford last week might have noticed a fair-haired woman in a blue-denim work uniform stained with paint.
She stood on a ladder, painting a wall with a giant brush in her hand. But this was not just another interior decorator.
Lane Crawford frequently invites artists to revamp its interior design. On this occasion it was American artist Maya Hayuk who was solicited from New York to the Beijing Seasons Place store.
Her mission was to express the spring/summer 2010 theme, Style Revolution.
She painted one of the walls so that giant butterfly-shaped patterns, yellow, red, blue, pink and green, overlap, and then hung flowered skirts, shirts and T-shirts nest to it.
The artist uses two words - "colorful" and "happy" - to describe her work.
"The idea is a spring-style revolution so I think they want to do something really colorful, with a lot of energy and pushing the boundaries a little bit ... I love the fact that when two colors cross, you get a third one," Hayuk says.
With a Ukrainian family background, she says she can always take inspiration from the community.
Although her task in Beijing was to create a spring environment for a trendy shopping mall, she says she was never daunted. She believes there is a natural affinity between fashion and art.
"Fashion is a way that everybody has a means to express himself or herself personally. Like every choice we make in our clothes is an artistic statement," she explains. "Not everyone would think themselves as a painter, an artist, or a photographer. But everyone, without even realizing it, is expressing something through their clothes."
Although she describes herself as a street artist, Hayuk said this represents only a fraction of her artistic life. She has been a photographer since she was a teenager and began to play the piano aged 3. She believes that most of her artistic expression has something in common, which is "to be intuitive, creative and open-minded".
This is thanks, in no small part, to the city she lives in, she says. Hayuk went to New York eight years ago. She confesses that in some ways the city is new to her, but says she knows how to take inspiration from it. Working in a studio in Brooklyn, she met artists from all over the world. From there, she made different friends, who gave her an entre into the fields of music, environmental art and photography.
Having been in Beijing for only a couple of days, she says she's not had time to explore the city yet. But she says that she is keen to visit the 798 Art District. "That place may be like the studio where I was working. I want to see how Chinese artists work and live, though I don't know much about them," she says.
