Cj Hendry has perfected the art of giving people something to talk about. She just has no interest in joining in.
Over the past decade, Hendry’s work has brewed a cocktail of excitement, criticism, and internet discourse. The Australian artist first made her name with hyperreal drawings of luxury objects, which soon found their way into the collections of Beyoncé, Pharrell Williams, and Lenny Kravitz, among others. That brush with celebrity led to collaborations with French luxury houses including Christian Louboutin and Louis Vuitton, propelling her name to the forefront of contemporary art—and Instagram’s algorithm. As her practice expanded from coloured-pencil drawings into increasingly ambitious immersive installations, so too did the conversation surrounding it.
When Flower Market—one of Hendry’s best-known installations—opened at Gardens by the Bay in early June, it wasn’t long before she became one of Singapore’s most talked-about names. Visitors could wander rows of plush blooms and pick the flowers of their choice, plus a complimentary one. More than 60,000 people attended over the run, and the installation rapidly became a social media fixture—though not without controversy, drawing online scrutiny over crowd control and resale culture. For a work centred on something as unassuming as flowers, it proved remarkably effective at provoking opinions.
Hendry, however, could scarcely be less interested in the torrent of commentary. “You can’t control everyone’s narrative,” she says. It is an attitude that explains rather a lot about her. While everyone else is still debating the exhibition she’s just opened, she’s already thinking about the next one.
If there is a philosophy underpinning the spectacle of her art, it’s an uncomplicated one. “You can come experience my exhibitions however you choose to,” Hendry says. Rather than prescribing meaning, she is more interested in making art that feels open to everyone. In fact, it’s watching people interact with the work that delights her most, be it schoolchildren darting through an installation or an elderly visitor carefully choosing a felt flower to take home. For Hendry, these are the moments that matter most—the human interactions no artwork can dictate.
It’s also what she hopes visitors will find in juju world, her second Singapore installation, which opened shortly after Flower Market wrapped in late June. JuJu is Hendry’s collectible character, a soft, bunny-like plush with floppy ears and a flower in place of one eye. Released in limited-edition drops, the character swiftly developed a devoted following—so much so that juju world is now the first “universe” dedicated to the collectible. For the global launch in Singapore, Hendry created an inflatable, sunshine-yellow playground fitted with gigantic slides, JuJu-shaped balls, and exclusive JuJu blind boxes.
Hendry is well aware that her limited-edition releases and one-off installations have a habit of attracting queues and falling victim to scalpers. As she puts it, “hype comes with the territory.” In an ideal world, she admits, her exhibitions would exist sans chaos or online commentary, but she refuses to let either become the point. “People are just getting too deep,” she says. Whether someone leaves with a single JuJu, a handful of flowers, or a memorable afternoon, Hendry is happy to let people take from the work whatever they will.
“I’m not out here to please everyone,” she says. “As an artist, my job is to make you excited, angry… to make you stop and think, and it needs to sometimes be absurd.” It’s perhaps the closest she comes to articulating a manifesto. Even then, Hendry doesn’t overthink it. While audiences debate the commerciality and cultural significance of her work, she has already moved on to whatever comes next, offering little more than a passing mention of a future “JuJu and friends” project.
To some, she may seem a little too blasé for the level of fascination she inspires. Either way, she appears perfectly content to let everyone else do the analysing. As for herself? “I just kind of go on vibes.”
Ahead, Hendry discusses her Singapore installations, the accessibility of art, and what makes an idea worth pursuing.
GRAZIA Singapore (GS): What was the moment you realised JuJu needed a world of its own?
Cj Hendry (CH): Phillips [Auction] asked me to design a toy. I’d never done it before, so I leaned on AI through 30 or 40 iterations until something cute and friendly came out the other side, partly as a softer answer to the whole Labubu moment. But the same thing that happened with my drawings happened here: once JuJu existed as an object with its own little following, it started to feel too small. Drawings stopped being enough for me years ago because I didn’t want to limit the work to a wall—JuJu hit that same wall fast, and “a world of its own” was the obvious next step, not a tagline.
GS: What made Singapore the right place for juju world to make its debut?
CH: We’d just watched Flower Market pull over 60,000 people through IMBA Theatre at Gardens by the Bay, and that told us everything about how this city shows up—across language, age, every background. There was no version of this where we didn’t come back, and giving Singapore the global premiere, in a yellow that exists nowhere else, felt like the right way to earn that.
GS: Flower Market has become one of your most recognisable projects. Looking back, did you sense it would resonate at that scale?
CH: No, and I don’t think I ever do—I look at what’s next, not where I’m at, and I genuinely don’t know how something will land until it’s out in the world. The first sign anything was different was actually a disaster: we got shut down on Roosevelt Island for overcrowding, and that 5am scramble turned into Industry City and an even better show. Everything since—Hong Kong, Rockefeller Center, Singapore—followed from there; I didn’t predict it.
GS: You’ve spoken about your belief in democratising art. Has social media—and particularly your influence on it—become one of your most effective tools for doing so?
CH: Social media is the tool, not the point—it’s how I built a direct line to people without ever going through the gallery system. But the democratising part isn’t the post, it’s what people can do without money once they show up: a free flower, a free ball pit, a church full of falling petals nobody paid to see. My drawings sell for amounts that just disappear into private homes, and that’s the gap I’m actually trying to close.
GS: When you’re standing in one of your completed exhibitions for the first time, what tells you that you’ve achieved what you set out to do?
CH: It’s rarely a number—it’s a kid and a grandparent excited about the same thing for completely different reasons. When something works I feel it almost immediately, and my instinct is to move on rather than dwell on it. I don’t get attached to any one show as “the best”, because the moment I start repeating a formula, I lose what made it interesting.
GS: After building flower markets, inflatable installations, swimming pools, and baking hundreds of cakes, what makes an art concept worth pursuing today?
CH: It has to come from wherever I actually am in my life—Plaidground came out of being knee-deep in playgrounds with my kids, JuJu came out of a brief I shouldn’t have said yes to—and it has to scare me a little. It’s a snowball: each idea makes the next one possible, but I’m not interested in repeating a trick that already worked. If it doesn’t push the scale or the story past the last one, it’s not worth my time.
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