Louis Vuitton is proud to present an exhibition titled “The Art of Dress” at Espace Louis Vuitton Hong Kong featuring contemporary artworks by three female artists.
“The Art of Dress” is not concerned with fashion or glamour or the cut, colour, drape, fit, function or feel of any particular garments or any particular period, community or style. Instead, “The Art of Dress” features artists who use the idea of clothing as a metaphor for the body and the fact that we are all individually, gloriously different, but connected to one another through our humanity. It explores the essence of dress as an abstract concept and aims to explore the notion of the everyday made universal through art. For each of the artists in this exhibition, the art of dress is a metaphor for personal experiences that now only exist in memory.
In her knitted works Hong Kong artist Movana Chen creates fabrics that may be fashioned into forms, but the thing that gives her works resonance is the fact that they are knitted out of the pages of books and magazines that were given to her by friends and strangers. When she shreds a book, it is to remake it in such a way that the lives of the owner, author, artist, and every other person who may have read the same work are intermingled into something shared.
In her Weaving Intimacy series of works, Hong Kong artist Man Fung Yi presents metal sculptures derived from the form of actual garments worn by herself or her family. These sculptures enclose nothing and are presented as an open network of metal wires in order to make the nothingness explicit. The creation by Man Fung Yi of an open skein of metal, describing and hiding nothing, actually gives it greater substance.
Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen has been using used clothing in her installations and sculptures since 1995. For her, these intimate objects are imbued with the personal memories of the original owner and the character of the times they were worn. She sees them as a way of broadening her imagination, and a way of connecting with both their personal histories and their wider social histories so that the entire society can be implicated in her work.
By rejecting any specific identity all of these works allow us to reflect on the notion of universality. Without much effort we could all see could ourselves reflected in these works or placed in a situation that helps us relate better to them. Our implied presence in this exhibition is a reflection on personal histories and notions of identity that lead us to consider the complex processes of adaptation, tradition and change in both Eastern and Western cultures.
Exhibition curator: Jonathan Thomson
