If you’ve spent any time on social media in the past year, you’ve almost certainly stumbled across her work — a room flooded with thousands of oversized plush flowers, or a rabbit-like creature with a single bloom draped over one eye. What you might not have known is that both belong to the same singular creative mind: Cj Hendry, the Australian artist who has quietly become one of the most talked-about names in contemporary experiential art.
Right now, Singapore is her stage.
From Brisbane Dropout to Brooklyn-Based Art Phenomenon
Born in South Africa and raised in Brisbane, Australia, Catherine Jenna Hendry — known professionally as Cj Hendry — didn’t follow a conventional path to artistic recognition. She enrolled in architecture at Queensland University of Technology and finance at the University of Queensland, but left both programmes before completing either. In 2013, she committed fully to art. By 2015, she had relocated to New York City, setting up a sprawling studio in Brooklyn that would become the base for some of the most ambitious experiential art projects of the past decade.
Crucially, she did all of this without formal art training. She describes herself as “not very creative” — a paradox that underscores something deeper about how she thinks about her work. For Hendry, technical mastery isn’t the point. The concept, the accessibility, the *experience* — that’s what matters.
The Art That Made Her Famous: Hyperrealism as Obsession
Hendry’s earliest work was as precise as it was provocative. Using a self-developed scribbling technique — layers upon layers of ink applied with painstaking deliberateness — she created large-scale hyperrealistic drawings of luxury consumer objects: crumpled Gucci shopping bags, Chanel perfume bottles, Hermès packaging, Louboutin sneakers. Individual pieces could take up to 200 hours to complete, and the results were so convincing that a double-take was genuinely required to confirm they were drawings at all.
The subjects were intentional. By rendering luxury goods with such obsessive fidelity, Hendry was doing something philosophically interesting — probing consumer desire, the fetishisation of brands, and the strange space where aspiration and absurdity meet. It was Warholian in spirit: an interrogation of what we value and why, rendered in meticulous, hand-drawn detail.
Her first major sale came in 2014: a hyperrealistic drawing of a pair of R.M. Williams boots, which sold for $10,000. Shortly after, a Macquarie Bank executive paid USD $50,000 for her drawing of a crumpled Gucci shopping bag. Kanye West purchased a piece featuring his own face on a $100 bill. Pharrell Williams, Vera Wang, and Christian Louboutin all entered her orbit — as collectors, collaborators, or both.
The Instagram Artist Who Rewrote the Rules
What truly sets Hendry apart from her artistic generation isn’t just her technique — it’s her business model. At a time when most emerging artists were still beholden to gallery systems, she made Instagram her primary exhibition and sales platform, building a following that now exceeds 800,000.
“In the past, artists had to wait for a gallery to do your show and people couldn’t just see your work,” she has said. “Now you can show people whatever you want at any time you wish.”
She didn’t just post finished pieces. She shared process videos — watching the work emerge through layers of scribble, in real time, was its own kind of art. These became marketing tools and proof of concept simultaneously, demonstrating the extraordinary labour behind what could otherwise be mistaken for a photograph.
After briefly working with an Australian dealer in the early stages of her career, she chose not to renew the relationship, striking out independently instead. She negotiates her own brand collaborations, produces her own exhibitions, and sells directly to collectors — bypassing gallery commissions entirely and retaining full creative control. Her 2017 collaboration with Christian Louboutin at Art Basel Hong Kong, where she created a series of colour-pencil works inspired by the brand’s palette, became a landmark moment: it was proof that high-fashion brands would come to her-on-her terms.
Works from her studio now regularly command five- to six-figure prices. She operates out of a 5,000-square-foot Brooklyn studio. She has no gallerist. She has herself — and a few hundred thousand square centimetres of paper.
The Pivot: From Canvas to Immersive Experience
Around 2018, Hendry’s practice took a decisive turn. Rather than producing individual works for individual collectors, she began transforming entire spaces. Her Monochrome show in Brooklyn submerged visitors in colour-coordinated rooms built from modular plastic bricks. A subsequent installation featured a basketball hoop tree. Another, a Rorschach-inspired bounce house. Each time, the formula was the same: take something familiar, scale it to the absurd, make it physically inhabitable, make it free.
The Flower Market was the moment this approach went truly global.
Flower Market: The Installation That Conquered the World
First staged in 2024 at Roosevelt Island in New York — in collaboration with beauty brand Clé de Peau Beauté — the Flower Market filled a massive tent with tens of thousands of oversized plush flowers in vibrant colours. Admission was free. Every visitor received a complimentary bloom to take home.
The response was extraordinary. Crowds were so overwhelming that officials shut down part of Roosevelt Island due to overcrowding, and Hendry relocated the installation to Brooklyn’s Industry City as a result — a moment she later called “a blessing in disguise.” The industrial setting gave the market an unexpected rawness that added to its character.
The concept is deceptively simple: a flower market, but reimagined. Instead of fragile, fleeting petals, the blooms are permanent — soft, oversized, endlessly tactile. Visitors wander, pick flowers, build bouquets. It transforms shopping into something meditative. It democratises an art experience in the truest sense.
In 2025, Flower Market returned to New York’s Rockefeller Center in a second edition — Flower Market 2.0 — and went viral all over again. From there, it embarked on a world tour: New York, Hong Kong (where it showed at the Central Harbourfront for Hong Kong Art Month), Abu Dhabi, and Sydney. Each city received exclusive local variations — flowers designed specifically for that context, available nowhere else.
Now, Singapore has its turn. The Southeast Asian debut, running from 10 to 14 June 2026 at the IMBA Theatre in Gardens by the Bay, features over 30 flower varieties including eight Singapore-exclusive blooms: the Papilionanthe Miss Joaquim, the Raffles’ Pitcher Plant, and the Singapore Ginger Flower among them. True to form, the Singapore Flower Market became an immediate cultural moment — with videos of visitors rushing to claim limited blooms circulating on social media, sparking the kind of passionate, slightly kiasu national conversation that only the most genuinely exciting things provoke.
Enter JuJu: The Collectible That’s Capturing a Generation
If Flower Market introduced Hendry to mass audiences, her second act in Singapore reveals where her creative universe is heading.
JuJu is Hendry’s first collectible art toy series, launched in Hong Kong in late 2025 in partnership with auction house Phillips. The character — a floppy-eared, wide-eyed figure with a single flower draped over one eye — is deliberately enigmatic. Soft-bodied, quietly expressive, and tinged with lore, JuJu sits somewhere between childhood companion and fine art object.
“I’ve always loved the idea of taking art off the walls and into people’s hands,” Hendry has said. “JuJu is all about joy and collectability — playful, lighthearted and meticulously crafted.”
The JuJu universe has expanded rapidly: limited-edition vinyl sculptures, blind-box bag charms in 24 colourways, towering holiday installations, and now its most ambitious manifestation yet. JuJu World — opening at IMBA Theatre from 20 June to 18 July 2026 — is the world’s first immersive experience built entirely around the JuJu character. A sea of yellow balls, a giant inflatable JuJu, and surreal sculptural environments designed to feel physical, joyful, and strangely dreamlike.
And in a now-signature Hendry move, Singapore gets something no one else does: JuJu World will exist exclusively in yellow here — the first and only time the experience will ever appear in this colourway, anywhere in the world.
Why Singapore, Why Now?
Hendry’s Asian expansion is no accident. She has steadily deepened her relationship with the region — multiple projects in Hong Kong, a new studio there, an instinctive understanding of how art-hungry, visually literate, and social-media-fluent Asian audiences respond to experiential work. Singapore, with its culture of immersive pop-ups, its passion for limited-edition collectibles, and its appetite for events that double as content, is a natural next stop.
There is also something poignant about the timing. In a post-pandemic landscape where people crave sensory, communal, and joyful experiences, Hendry’s work offers exactly that — without the gatekeeping of the traditional art world. You don’t need to understand art history to feel something when you’re surrounded by ten thousand plush flowers. You don’t need to be a collector to hold a JuJu. That accessibility is the point.
“Her primary goal has always been to make art genuinely accessible to everyone,” her team has said. The Flower Market, with its free entry and complimentary first bloom, is perhaps the purest expression of that philosophy.
The Bigger Picture: What Cj Hendry Represents
There is a version of the art world that would dismiss Hendry — too commercial, too Instagram, too fun. But that misses what she has actually accomplished. She built an entirely self-sustaining creative practice from scratch, without institutional support, without a degree, without a gallerist, in one of the most competitive cities on earth. She identified the shift in how people discover and engage with art — through screens, through feeds, through shared experiences — and built her career around it rather than against it.
Her work has evolved continuously: from monochrome ink drawings to coloured pencil works, from individual commissions to city-scale installations, from luxury object studies to whimsical plush universes. The thread connecting all of it is a commitment to craft, a fascination with consumer culture, and an instinctive understanding of what makes people stop scrolling — and start feeling.
In Singapore right now, thousands of people are doing exactly that: clutching plush flowers in air-conditioned rooms, building bouquets they didn’t know they needed, and preparing to step into a yellow inflatable world inhabited by a character with a flower over one eye.
That’s Cj Hendry. And she’s just getting started.
Cj Hendry’s Flower Market takes place from 10th till 14th June 2026 at IMBA Theatre, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore.
JuJu World by Cj Hendry runs from 20th June until 18th July 2026 at IMBA Theatre, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore. For ticketing info and to find out more, follow this link here.
