ART • SKIN – A date with Art and Fashion
Fashion and art are inseparable. However, many reasons like the variation of materials, lifestyle, and macroeconomic environment and more eventually make fashion unable to present its artistic appearance freely. If we say that art can reflect the human heart, then fashion can reflect our skin. As the saying goes, “What you look like comes from the heart.” Fashion is a technique that can externalize our thoughts and become a way for us to express our personal identity. So in this line of thinking, we can say that fashion is also a form of art materialization.
From Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, to Elsa Schiaprelli and Salvatore Dali, and through today, there is a crossover between fashion and art, as a medium of expressing ourselves and we know that fashion has never stopped being art. Although Miuccia Prada thought that, ever since the collaboration of Vivienne Westwood and punk music, fashion has never participated in art in an interesting way. Contrarily, fashion has always stolen the images of art, but the imagery itself is created in a new context. Susan Sontag sad, “When the primary activity of a society is to manufacture consumer imagery, this society is becoming modernized.” This is the core concept of the contemporary art creation.
ART • SKIN – A date with Art and Fashion will interpret from two angles, Art and Fashion. How to make the so-called “prototype thinking” demonstrate the same magic power in different mediums and forms and showing the halo of the creativity from the outside to the inside. Eric Choong, the Chinese fashion designer from Malaysia, borrowed elements from Ahai painting and placed them into haute couture’s context. Due to the changes in human lifestyle, as the service for only a minimum of people, haute couture has been difficult to find in our daily lives. But because of its position on the top of the fashion pyramid, it is the medium through which a designer’s can best express their imagination without any restriction from the material environment. In this ancient hand-tailored fashion tradition, Eric Choong made fun of scissors and fabrics an expression of art. While in Ahai’s contemporary ink painting, to some extent, it is also borrowed by embedding modern thinking into the coat of traditional Chinese painting. The horses, geese, flowers and even the “Spring” of Marcel Duchamp’s under Ahai’s paint brush are placed in the same frame of space, demonstrating the state of modern people who lost their soul in the way of sleepwalking. Whether it’s a marvellous “painting” or the exquisite and delicate “skin”, both retain the strong trace of handmade tradition in the course of its creation – yet the result turns out to be contemporary. “Art” and “skin” echo each other and construct an interesting collaboration between art and fashion. Fashion and art learn from one other just as artists learn from other artists. A single element can be drawn out from its original context and then continue to derive new meaning in a different situation.
画 。皮 – 绘画与时装的对话
时尚与艺术一直形影不离，但因其物质材料、人类生活方式、宏观经济环境等等缘由，终无法以艺术的样貌如此自由地存在于世。如果说，艺术照看的是人心，那时尚照看的则是人的“表皮”，但古时所说的“相由心生”也是极有道理的——时尚是外化人类思维的技术，是人表达其个人身份的手段。因此，时尚又何尝不是艺术的物化形式呢？
从Coco Chanel和Igor Stravinsky，到Elsa Schiaprelli和Salvatore Dali，再到今天时装与艺术的种种cross-over，时装作为构建人身体外部环境的媒介，和艺术的嫁接从未停止过。虽然Miuccia Prada认为，从Vivienne Westwood与朋克音乐的合谋之后，时尚从来没有真正有意思地参与到艺术中去，反而一直在盗取艺术的形象，但意象本身便是当代艺术创作的公共“素材”，经由“挪用”，被嫁接到新的语境中。Susan Sontag认为：“当一个社会的主要活动是在制造与消费意象时，这个社会就变得现代化。”这也是当下艺术创作的核心。
“画·皮——绘画与时装的对话”从艺术和时尚两个维度来诠释，所谓创作的“原型思维”如何在不同的媒介和形式上，发生着同样的魔力，由皮及里地展现创意的光芒。在这个形式特别的展览中，马来西亚华人时装设计师宗柏伸借取阿海绘画中的元素，将之置入了haute couture的环境中。由于人类生活方式的改变，只为极少数人服务的haute couture已很难在大众的日常生活中寻到踪迹，但正是其位于时装金字塔最顶端的地位，使其最不受物质环境的限制，最能承载设计师想象力的载体。宗柏伸在这种古老的手工定制的时装传统中，以刀剪与布料的趣味上，亦是一种艺术化的表达。而阿海的当代水墨，以传统中国画为其外衣，置入当代思维，这也是某种程度上的借取。他画笔下的马、鹅、花，甚至是Marcel Duchamp的“泉”被并置到一个框架空间中，以梦游的姿态呈现当代人的失魂状态。在这里，无论巧夺天工的“画”，还是精致细腻的“皮”，在其创作过程中，都保有传统手工的浓烈痕迹，而其结果却又无疑是直指当下的。“画”与“皮”互相书写，构建了当下时尚与艺术间的有趣合作。时装与艺术，以及艺术与艺术的互为借镜，使得单一的素材从原始的语境中被抽离出来，并不断在不同的材质上，生发出新的意义。
此次展览亦荣幸地邀请到了创意机构Leagas Delaney的参与，使得艺术突破了架上的限制，创意机构也突破了受雇于商业机构的局限，能开放性地以“原型思维”为基础，展开当下各个层面创作的全方位对话。格蕊莉画廊则作为联系起多放创作力量的平台，向来以“艺术民主化”为己任，不仅与已功成名就的艺术大师合作，亦高度活跃地发掘新人，让普通民众亦能接近艺术。“画·皮——绘画与时装的对话”是格蕊莉画廊的全新尝试，使其不仅仅局限于一个艺术平台，而成全其了“创意平台”的全新身份。
