In the work of Scarlett Hooft Graafland you find a combination of straight photographic practice with performance and sculpture in which she constantly refers to a more profound cultural discourse of her surroundings.
 
She made extensive travels to various parts of the world to work on projects, such as in the highlands of , the arctic and .
 
In , in Fujian Province and Guanxi Province, she made perfomances with local people, for example with some fishermen of Xiamen, where their nets have similar colors like the material of the giant construction sites. In Dehua, Fujian Province, she worked on a ceremic project ‘Instant Sculpture’, where she tried to combine the two typical Chinese products porcelain and fire works. By the explosion of still wet porcelain vases the shapes look almost like delicate flowers.
 
Scarlett Hooft Graafland (1973) received a BFA at the Royal Academy in The Hague, The Netherlands, and a MFA at Parsons School of Design, New York. Her work has shown at various international photo festivals such as and Hyeres and solo shows at Michael Hoppen Gallery in London and Vous Etes Ici gallery in Amsterdam.
 
Hu Zi collects on paper her concerns, fears, desires, happiness and confusion regarding contemporary everyday life. Simultaneously delicate and bold, they represent the intimate, sensational inner world of a young female artist. Educated and raised in an era of unprecedented and accelerated urban and economic development her work reflects the innermost feelings of her generation. Whilst lacking the overt political criticism of her fore-bearers, she has developed a unique visual language which is multi-layered in its symbolic reference to daily life and her protest and celebration of it. She negotiates this complex landscape referencing the public and the private, the real and the abstract, the functional and the surreal, the decorative and the scientific. These images of contradiction and ambiguity open up her work to a vast and varied range of possible associations and as such collapse any notion of specific meaning. It is the delicate balance that she attains between the symbolic and the real that gives her work a uniqueness and longevity.