The Chinese New Wave changing the perception of Made in China

The Chinese New Wave changing the perception of Made in China

Collater.al Contributors · 4 years ago · Style

Despite of its global impact, we are used to follow the fashion system under the spotlight of big cities like New York, London, Milan and Paris. Other capitals are slowly joining the fashion calendar and, among these, Shanghai, cradle of some new talents whose design could have never prevented from catching our attention.

The role of China within the fashion industry is gaining more and more significance: on one side, Chinese consumers are attributed with 75% of the global luxury market growth, on the other, a new generation of designers, operating in and out of the motherland, is establishing a style that hardly goes unnoticed. If China gives birth to many talents of the industry, few are the ones that chose their own country as a base for their artistic and professional training. The majority of international students in schools like New York Parsons, or London Central Saint Martins, are Chinese. Over 120 designers on NYFW calendar are Chinese. The reasons behind this phenomenon refer back to Chinese protectionist policies which, having prescribed the censorship of some of the contents coming from the west and the use of many social media channels, make it harder to communicate with countries where fashion is on the lead. In response to this, from 2001, Shanghai Fashion Week is one of the last ones on the calendar and hosts many of those talents that, despite having studied elsewhere, come back on the runway of their own country of origin. Accompanying the official schedule, Labelhood, an festival of art and fashion dedicated to homegrown talents.

La New Wave cinese cambia la percezione del made in china | Collater.al 1

Familiar with the names of Alexander Wang, Philip Lim, Derek Lam or Vera Wang, Chinese-American designers for whom their culture of origin has never been a central inspirational vocation, today we acknowledge a new generation of designers that, in an ever-globalizing world, reaffirm their own heritage through their collections. Is it the dominant influence gained within international market or the desire of exploring personal identity that determined this shift in direction? If until recently Chinese consumers tended to invest on western brands, today, the growing desire to feel represented and the development of their market determined the propensity towards local designers over international ones. Designers, in their turn, claim a certain sense of pride and confidence, declaring as a starting point of their creative process their culture of origin.

Here follow the profiles of some of the designers changing the perception of Made in China once for all.

Angel Chen

La New Wave cinese cambia la percezione del made in china | Collater.al 2

Born in Shenzeng and relocated to London at the age of seventeen, Angel Chen is one of the pioneers in China’s repositioning within the fashion industry. Right after having graduated from Central Saint Martins, class 2014, she launched her own eponymous label that showed at Shanghai Fashion Week on the same year. Her collections alternate elements belonging to the streetwear world to regional characteristics of Chinese craftmanship. With a colorful aesthetic and a singular way to match materials, her work’s main inspiration source remains the world of youth culture. In spite of her stable presence at Shanghai Fashion Week, Angel Chen presents her collections in western countries first. For three consecutive seasons in she showed Milan, while this year in New York, as part of the Tmall China day. Her SS19 collection is inspired to Madame Ching, legendary pirate lived during Qing and Ming dynasty.

 

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Marrknull

La New Wave cinese cambia la percezione del made in china | Collater.al 5

Marrknull was launched in Bejing in 2015 by the creative duo of Tim Shi and Wang Wei. Their aesthetics evolve around the commonplaces of Chinese popular culture. Last collection’s mains inspiration sources were China’s social landscapes and “real” people’s behavior within this context. Designers are fascinated by the way these characters dress and behave and they captured them in the act of taking pictures or selfies with the iconic metal stick in a campaign resembling Martin Parr’s style. Through an innovative way of deconstructing male silhouettes, attention to structural changes in clothing, and breaking gender limits, Marrknull’s collections take on a multicultural direction. After their debut on the runways of London, Shaghai and New York, this year they’ve been selected winners of VFILES runway show in New York.

 

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Xander Zhou

La New Wave cinese cambia la percezione del made in china | Collater.al 4

Xander Zhou is Beijing’s young designer specialized in menswear apparel. His education began in his hometown with industrial design studies, to then develop his fashion education in the Netherlands. A character with an eclectic personality who identifies as his main style icon his mother with her hundred pairs of high heels. His starting point is the fabric and the way this relates to male silhouettes. His ability consists in creating a bridge connecting eastern and western culture. Protagonists of his last collection are in fact typical mandarin costumes collars, embroidered silk shirts and coats, Chinese dragons and ideograms, but also cargo pants and workwear.

 

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Text By Enrica Miller

The Chinese New Wave changing the perception of Made in China
Style
The Chinese New Wave changing the perception of Made in China
The Chinese New Wave changing the perception of Made in China
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Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue

Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue

Tommaso Berra · 2 days ago · Photography

One only has to listen to the conversations that arise inside Cecilie Mengel‘s head to imagine how they might be represented photographically. The Danish artist and now resident in New York makes shots that are inner dialogues born from the stimuli she herself receives from her surroundings and the people with whom she experiences very everyday moments.
The result is an artistic production that is marked by a strong variety in subjects and settings, as well as in style, sometimes documentary, other times closer to a certain posed and theatrical photography. They range from shots stolen in the home during a conversation to details of a can of Heinz sauce found in the glove compartment of a cab, all reconstructing a common, everyday story.
Cecilie Mengel’s technique also reflects this same idea of variety. In fact, the artist combines digital and analog photography, in other cases post production adds graphic marks to the images. The lights are sometimes natural other times forcedly created with flash, creating a sense of the whole that is perhaps less homogeneous but rich in personal suggestions and recounts.

Cecilie Mengel was recently a guest artist in the group exhibition ImageNation in New York, March 10-12, 2023 curated by Martin Vegas.

Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue
Photography
Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue
Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue
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Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya

Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya

Giorgia Massari · 2 days ago · Photography

A delicate, almost transparent and imperceptible veil floats before our eyes and filters reality, which becomes subjective and never absolute. The philosopher Schopenhauer called it “the veil of Maya,” that impediment that prohibits man from experiencing reality, that deludes us into thinking we know Truth. Photographer Diego Dominici places it between the viewer and his subjects, transforming it into the actual protagonist of the Atman and Red Clouds series. The figures – men and women – are trapped in the veil, struggling with it trying to escape, clinging tightly to it, trying to penetrate it; in other cases, instead, they welcome it, lying down and conforming to its persuading softness. The viewer is only allowed to catch a glimpse of the shapes of their naked bodies and their bones imprinted on the surface, in a dance of light and shadow that convey sensuality and loneliness at the same time.

Diego Dominici attempts to break the two-dimensionality of photography, creating two planes of depth: the one dictated by the fabric and its ripples and the one in which the subject is placed. The viewer’s eye is led to move continuously over the surface, trying to overcome it and thus reach the subject and its forms therefore, in other words, the Truth.
The analogy with human psychology is stated by the photographer who wants to “rip apart two-dimensionality to investigate the tangles of human interiority.” As in his shots, human beings can choose to be lulled by the veil of illusion, be caressed by a fictitious reality and stand firm on their point of view, or they can choose to break it, thus reaching the other side and look at reality from another perspective. The fabric, or rather the veil, becomes the emblem of relational barriers, those obstacles that come between us and others, which prevent us from understanding the motives of others and create unbridgeable distances. At the same time, the veil becomes part of us, a kind of wrapping that envelops and shapes us, preventing us from going beyond it. But, as Schopenhauer said, the veil of Maya must be torn down, ripped open like a Fountain’s canvas, human must shed the envelope like a snake changing its skin, in order to open up to the other. After all, what is love if not “the cancellation of the ego, the collapse of all conscious discrimination and the renunciation of all methodical choice?” said Salvador Dali in My Secret Life. Diego Dominici’s works thus invite deep intimate reflection but, thanks to his carefully curated aesthetics, they can also simply satisfy the eye and appear as sensual works, in which the veil becomes a prelude to intimate pleasure.

Diego Dominici | Collater.al
Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya
Photography
Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya
Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya
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The mass and the individual in the works of Sean Mundy

The mass and the individual in the works of Sean Mundy

Giorgia Massari · 4 days ago · Photography

From an Instagram reel of Canadian photographer Sean Mundy, one can sense the complexity of his photographic works. His are not just shots but rather it can be said that his works are the result of great imagination conveyed by photography, technical skills of digital post production, and detailed scenic construction. Indeed, in the reel, the photographer shows the process of making the work Summoning, which depicts a series of bodies plummeting from an opening in the ceiling. The Magritte-esque “flying” characters are actually the same person: the photographer takes multiple self-shots as he throws himself onto a mattress, simulating the fall, and then digitally processes them to create the composition. The result is a striking, conceptual work in which visual harmony accentuates and conveys social messages, with a particular focus on the dynamics of collective behavior.

Sean Mundy | Collater.al

Recurring in Sean Mundy’s works is the figure of a hooded man whose face is not visible. The total black clothing he wears makes him a mysterious, eerie, and shadowy figure, as if he were a soulless shadow. Very often the figure in black appears repeatedly in the same work, creating a united group resembling a cult, intent on actions that are at times macabre. In some works the group is set in opposition to an individual, as in the 2014 work Elude, in which figures in black chase a fleeing man, who differs in his clothing as an ordinary man in jeans and a t-shirt. In other works, however, ritual behaviors are performed, an example being the work Idolatry, which shows the group kneeling in front of a huge black cube suspended in the air. This series of works is a clear reference to social behaviors in which the individual does not possess his or her own personal identity but rather a collective identity emerges that pushes the individual to conform to the mass, both ideologically and aesthetically.
In other series the protagonist, alone or in a group, is placed in relation to elements that dominate the composition such as fire in the Barriers series, destroyed cityscapes in RUIN, and red tarps in Tethered, Sean Mundy’s most recent series. The intent always remains to communicate current issues, especially related to externally induced human psychological mechanisms but with obvious intimate repercussions.

Sean Mundy | Collater.al
Sean Mundy | Collater.al
Courtesy by Sean Mundy
The mass and the individual in the works of Sean Mundy
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The mass and the individual in the works of Sean Mundy
The mass and the individual in the works of Sean Mundy
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Dialogica: two projects on the elimination of racial discrimination

Dialogica: two projects on the elimination of racial discrimination

Laura Tota · 5 days ago · Photography

On the International Day Against Racism, Dialogica aims to investigate the ability of images to contribute, through an action of intercultural visual literacy, to the elimination of preconceptions related to the phenomena of migration or cultural diversity.
Since Gordon Parks began telling the poverty , social injustice and marginalization experienced by African Americans in the United States with dignity and sensitivity, a new narrative model has joined the assault photojournalism, contributing to outline a new iconography capable of restoring a de-colonized, more realistic and less stereotyped vision of the figure of the migrant or, more generally, of the black communities.

To a merely documentary approach, capable of producing hundreds of images that run the risk of feeding clichés and cheesy stereotypes, the new generations of authors working with images they prefer an investigation that focuses more on the place where they live through the use of more sophisticated languages or a insight on the social implications of the migration phenomenon.

The work “Nowhere Near” by the author Alisa Martynova focuses precisely on the need to return a peculiar identity to the erroneously unified vision of the migrant. Alisa uses metaphors and similarities to tell the stories of young migrants, interviewed in Italy (and beyond) for over three years. The groups of migrants, protagonists of exhausting journeys, are metaphorically compared to constellations of hypervelocity stars, that’s to say celestial bodies trapped on the edge of black holes, a kind of limbo from which they can escape only thanks to a clash between two black holes: an exceptional event that projects the stars away from a precarious balance to reach unknown destinations.

Thus, the Dream of a better life, trying to achieve an Eldorado imagined for a long time, but never really displayed, is poetically rendered through night shots in which light reveals for a few seconds what is hidden, showing fabrics and clothes iconographically linked to Afro/Oriental culture, but captured in other places, where the sea often bravely crossed to reach a better life is often present, or the forest/forest to hide in to become ghosts in a foreign land.

A visual short circuit that reaffirms the presence of another culture in an unknown territory, and that moves a reflection on the inner world of migrants with the intention of arousing reactions in those who look and to emphasize the individuality and peculiarity of each portrayed subject, bearer of experiences and unique and unrepeatable stories.

The project “Black skin white algorithms” by the Angolan author Alice Marcelino focuses on the danger of the black communities’ cultural flattening. Alice, whose work explores the dimension of belonging starting from the concepts of culture, tradition, migration and identity, she denounces the anomalies present in facial detection technologies when they interact with subjects with dark skin. Being mainly programmed by Western Man to detect light skin, these technologies do not equally accurately identify darker skin tones, returning summary or approximate views of the recognized subjects.

The inferiority of the black population is therefore perpetrated not only in such unconscious bias, but it’s also fueled by technologies, programmed by white Westerners, resulting in the provision of potential false statements.

To underline this leveling, Alice replaces the subject’s mug shots with the ASCII code one (a standard character set included by all computers) – which reduces their identity to a binary result, devoid of meaning and complexity: the reading of the face is thus totally canceled and made unreadable by both man and facial recognition system.

Alisa Martynova | Collater.al
Alisa Martynova | Collater.al
Alisa Martynova | Collater.al
Alisa Martynova | Collater.al
Alisa Martynova | Collater.al
Alisa Martynova | Collater.al
Alisa Martynova | Collater.al
Alice Marcelino | Collater.al
Alice Marcelino | Collater.al
Alice Marcelino | Collater.al
Dialogica: two projects on the elimination of racial discrimination
Photography
Dialogica: two projects on the elimination of racial discrimination
Dialogica: two projects on the elimination of racial discrimination
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