By Jenny Lin
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Artist Liu Jianhua's collaboration with Dior, 'Daily Fragile: Starlight'
It’s a great time for fashion and art unions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently hosted ‘Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity’ and ‘Punk: Chaos to Couture’, Yoko Ono joined forces with Opening Ceremony, and Yayoi Kusama became the latest artist to team up with Louis Vuitton. In Asia, collaborations between artists and fashion houses have been exploding – quite literally, with Cai Guo-Qiang’s firework-imprinted Issey Miyake dresses.
Some of fashion and art’s boldest crossovers can be found in Shanghai, Mainland China’s cosmopolitan financial capital. The city has spawned an array of art/fashion hybrids, from artist Yang Fudong’s First Spring, a short film for Prada’s 2010 menswear campaign that was projected on the façade of the Prada store on Nanjing Road in Shanghai, to a new prize sponsored by Hugo Boss, specifically for young Asian artists.
It’s tempting to dismiss such examples as symptoms of global capitalism in which the fashion industry co-opts hot art-world trends while China’s avant-garde artists sell out by creating glorified advertisements. It’s no coincidence that Shanghai is a booming economic centre, where the appetite for luxury goods and fine art grows increasingly voracious. And Asian art/fashion collaborations sound alarms amidst globalized labour’s grim realities, epitomized by the latest factory collapse in Bangladesh, and narrated in Gommarrah (2006/2008), a novel-turned-film featuring Chinese sweatshop workers in Naples producing ‘Made in Italy’ couture. Yet, even in the face of globalization’s vulgar materialism and cutthroat capitalism, fashion houses and contemporary Chinese artists are weaving a more complicated – and at times inspired – nexus than the case of multinational co-optation would suggest.
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‘Facing Faces’ installation view at Bottega Veneta’s art space in Shanghai
Take respected scholar Gu Zheng, who since 2012 has been curating an ongoing exhibition series at the Bottega Veneta art space in Shanghai’s upscale waterfront district. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Italian brand’s exclusivity, Gu Zheng exhibits some of China’s edgiest contemporary art in the lofted gallery above Bottega Veneta’s retail space. ‘Facing Faces’, the most recent show, on view earlier this summer, brought together five of China’s most interesting artists towards a consideration of shifting subjectivities through fresh takes on portraiture. Photographer Ye Funa confronted the construction of identity, memory and personal history by displaying original family photos with digital manipulations that deceptively swap the artist’s family members for herself. Wei Bi’s Diane Arbus-like portraits of residents in his Hunan village were framed by the artist’s personal musings (a local performer’s visage recalled an early romance, a labourer’s hat conjures conflicted paternal love), scrawled in elegant Chinese calligraphy. Di Jinjun uses an outmoded wet plate process to depict photographic subjects in hauntingly exposed compositions, while painter Zhang Enli alters perceptions of human form through broken mosaic structures, and a funny, target-like portrait of the top of a person’s head.
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Ye Funa’s ‘Research of Lost Time’ in ‘Facing Faces’ at Bottega Veneta’s art space
For Liu Jianhua, whose abstract porcelain faces hung as flattened, minimalist busts at the exhibition’s entrance, this Bottega Veneta display was not the artist’s first fashion collaboration. In 2008, Christian Dior sponsored Liu’s creation of Daily Fragile: Starlight, an installation of dozens of rows of ceramic replicas of Dior handbags, shoes and perfume bottles, situated under golden Ds, is, os, and rs that hung like a sparkling mobile. This piece stood as the high-end iteration of Liu’s series, ‘Daily Fragile’, first exhibited in the Chinese Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennial. For ‘Daily Fragile’, Liu reproduces everyday items in porcelain, such as hammers, soda bottles and baseball caps. Assembled in large-scale installations that cover entire gallery floors, these uniformly colourless objects appear as the ghostly residue of commodity culture, conjuring China’s sprawling street stalls and the country’s incessant flow of factory-made goods. The title calls attention to the fragility of porcelain, as well as the illusory nature of the values we assign to commodities, whether haute couture or wholesale.
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Liu Jianhua’s ‘Daily Fragile’
Like many contemporary Chinese art works, most famously Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010–11) at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Liu’s installation utilized artisanal labour from Jingdezhen, China’s historic porcelain capital. Based in Shanghai, Liu maintains a workshop in his hometown of Jingdezhen, a city that has been left out of China’s fast-paced development. Outsourcing artistic labour to porcelain manufacturers there, Liu mimics the operations of global corporations, while reversing the logic of mass-production through a move fashion often purports – but fails – to make: reinvigorating an artisan-based economy that has suffered under China’s rise as the world’s factory.
Gu Zheng’s exhibition this autumn at Bottega Veneta will feature works by Shanghai-based photography collective Birdhead, comprised of Song Tao and Ji Weiyu. Birdhead creates street-style photographs of quotidian urban realities – demolition, aimless youth, faded advertisements – that stand against the official portrayal of Shanghai as China’s most glamorous metropolis. While exhibiting photo installations in the 2011 Venice Biennial and in a 2012 group show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Birdhead embarked on its own fashion collaboration, joining forces with Swatch, the Swiss watch brand remembered for its 1980s and ’90s art-inspired designs, like those of Keith Haring. Birdhead’s limited edition Swatch design resembles a detail from a black and white photograph, a Chinese ink painting blot, and a trace of a bird. The collective discuss its Swatch collaboration in surprisingly philosophical terms, as a chance to contemplate how photographs question the meaning of time.
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Artist collective Birdhead’s design for Swatch
Under the visionary curatorship of Gu Zheng, Bottega Veneta’s display of work by China’s leading experimental artists reveals that Shanghai’s most current and probing exhibitions are taking place not in the city’s ever expanding state-run museums, or privately funded museums and galleries, but in the spaces of creative freedom and readymade economic support afforded by foreign fashion brands. In a city with a distinct lack of non-profit and artist-run spaces, fashion houses flash like beacons for artists striving to make work outside of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machine. Fashion corporations and retail spaces, however counter-intuitively, also afford artists the chance to work without the market demands driving Shanghai’s private art museums, many of which resort to leasing exhibition space to the highest bidder. Paradoxically, fashion collaborations are allowing artists working in Shanghai the ability to create and disturb the framing of art works as luxury items.
Jenny Lin is a writer and art historian currently based in Shanghai, China.
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