Celebrity Life

What’s the future of fashion? What’s unique about Hong Kong style? What’s next for your industry? What’s in and what’s out? We pose these questions to the designers, entrepreneurs, leaders, stylists and influencers who’ve made an impact on fashion here.

With Covid focusing attention on our own backyard, this era of style in the city is renegotiating in familiar territory. And from talking to the experts, common arcs emerge. 

Johanna Ho

Designer, sustainability champion and founder of Phlvo Platform

Circularity, transparency, responsibility, respect and a proper value system – I feel these all must be the future of fashion. In fashion, I’m inspired by people, human values and the new possibilities of technology. In Hong Kong, there’ll be more connections between fashion education and the industry: mentorships and bridging or training programmes for students within the industry. This is a new season for me – with this new platform concept of Phlvo I want to start bringing a connection between the East and West. I don’t want to chase the chase anymore, or “accelerate growth”, which has been the fashion industry over the past decades – fast fashion, whether mass-produced or luxury brands. It’s all about reworking the system and dealing with issues such as exploitation, values, customers experiences, connection and relevance.

Karmuel Young

Designer and founder of Karmuel Young

Fashion’s future is gender-neutral. Some brands propose that direction by wading into gender-fluid, unisex or polysexual fashions, but I believe it’s about an extreme sense of self. Fashion is becoming more open to self-expression and letting the audience decide what they buy and want to wear. The younger generation pays less attention to traditional gender roles and looks and more towards integrity and authenticity.

Arnault Castel

Founder of Kapok

The future of fashion is in rediscovering how to make people feel beautiful, confident, comfortable and fun. It should be less a signifier of “coolness” or social class. It should stay away from limited edition and collectors and become again a way for us to communicate who we are. Hong Kong is unique because it embraces the new with a great knowledge of past style. Hong Kong style has no fear.

Vivienne Tam

Designer and founder of Vivienne Tam

Since the pandemic began and everyone is homebound, fashion is localising … Society is now ready to support and appreciate Hong Kong designs, we’ll search deeper into Hong Kong’s history and culture, but maintain a proud global voice. It seems there are more restrictions and taboos with the political conflicts around; it’s getting challenging, but challenges make us more creative and focused. The future of fashion is more inclusive with universal values and an emphasis on sustainability and health. People are adopting healthier lifestyles and sporting cultures – I’m designing to blend beauty and style with protection, as in my crossover collection with Masklab and using antibacterial fabric for my travelling trench coats when the gates finally open. Fashion shows can be at any time now and anywhere; the fashion norms and rules are deconstructed and move towards more artistic and unexpected ways of presentation.

Douglas Young

Co-founder, Goods of Desire

Fashion, like art, is a form of social commentary, and our society is very polarised now. You have split realities and fashion will mirror that, in the sense that it will become more diversified. In the past there was a central flow of fashion trends. In the future, these trends will break into fragments and become multiple trends. There won’t be one mainstream trend any longer – the future is diversity. Local fashion will find its own identity and uniqueness through local street culture, because Hong Kong is an advanced city. People are sophisticated in their style and taste, very international and diversified … Hong Kong will soon find its own identity, uniqueness and style. I’m inspired by the way people dress in Hong Kong, especially grass-roots people. The way they boldly mix things freely without consideration – so you have a lot of accidental fashionistas! Also, the ingenuity of adapting things really inspires me, not just in fashion but design in general. The unlikely combinations produce surprising contrasts. Hong Kong people don’t seem inhibited by putting things together in the same way that, say, Westerners might not do.

What’s next for us? We’ve found success in translating our company from initially focusing on furniture to lifestyle and clothing. We found a unique angle in Chinese clothing that’s simultaneously both traditional and modern. A continued focus on boosting our e-commerce is also on the agenda. It also allowed us to discover a market beyond borders for our type of clothing and we’ll continue to pursue that.

Elle Lee

KOL, actress and emcee

The future of fashion is more environmentally cautious, easy on the Earth and soft on the skin. Hong Kong style has always been quite sharp, especially for ladies. Women aren’t afraid to dress out and express their personality in unisex and edgy ways.

Mayao Ma

Director of Fashion Farm Foundation

In the future, fashion will be more focused on the design than where the brand or designer is from. There are many more Hong Kong brands with potential to stand out in the international market. I believe there’ll be more collaborations too. For spring/summer 2022, the Fashion Farm Foundation is presenting the new collections of three brands – Pabe Pabe (accessories), Ponder.er (men’s and womenswear) and VANN (jewellery) – at Paris Fashion Week with a digital film presentation. The crew members are all from Hong Kong. It’s a chance to show the world how creative and talented our young people.

Kev Yiu

Designer and founder of Kev Yiu

Fashion has always been a personal statement of who you are, rather than trends to be followed. However, with technological advances I can imagine in the near future there’ll be something like a one-button device that can dress you up in any way you can imagine.

As the younger generation has become more open-minded through the information on social media and the internet, there’ll be no more stereotypes. The boundaries are about to be broken. Well, maybe they already have been: men in skirts and other gender-blending concepts are no longer as shocking as they once were.

Justine Lee

Stylist and influencer

With the limitations of travel, I feel the city is looking inwards for fashion talent. I still feel there’s room for creativity even with the restrictions we’re under. In Hong Kong, the speed at which we consumed fashion before the protests and Covid-19 was super-fast-paced and, in a way, unsustainable. We’ve slowed down a lot recently and I think consumers, brands and retailers are reprioritising their focus. There’s a greater sense of community and I feel we’re seeing a gradual shift into more conscious consumption.

Faye Tsui

KOL and stylist

The pandemic led us to adopt a new normal in every way, people are paying more attention to reducing pollution. I’ve noticed people in Hong Kong are changing their buying behaviour – it’s important for local designers
to be environmentally conscious, use sustainable materials, especially packaging, and design in a way that’s more durable. Now, I think Hong Kong has its own unique style. People tend to showcase their own personality and won’t just follow a trend if it doesn’t fit them – this wasn’t the case 20, 10 or even five years ago, when fashionistas were following or copying Japan, Paris or London … Now, we’re unique.

Jacky Tam

Stylist and editorial director at Vogue Man Hong Kong

The future of fashion is all about being yourself, trusting your own feeling and being honest to yourself. I think freedom defines Hong Kong style. After the past year or so, people are going through major changes, mentally as well, from being fashionable to wearing comfy PJs at home. To me, comfort is in; being pretentious is out.

Dorian Ho

Designer and founder of Dorian Ho

Nowadays fashion isn’t just about the design, but also how you build and market your brand. Social media have led consumers to adopt and move on from fashion trends quicker than ever before. We must react very quickly, and adjust designs and stock, but also learn to anticipate what the market wants from us. With the development of technology such as AR and VR, I believe the future of fashion is sustainability and technologically innovative design. There’ll be breakthroughs in design and more functional materials to improve the quality of life.

Barney Cheng

Designer and founder of Barney Cheng Couture

What’s the future of fashion in Hong Kong? Three words: sustainability, awareness and responsibility. I think it’ll be all about customisation, personalisation and interactive creativity next in the local industry. What’s Hong Kong style really? Branded living? My style is extravagant simplicity, always has been, always will be. And what’s next for my brand? I’m a glorified tailor to the discerning few! I’ve been here for 28 years and hope to stay here for at least as long in the future.

Harrison Wong

Designer and founder of Harrison Wong

What’s the future of fashion? In design, sustainability remains the main issue and concern from my perspective. From a retail perspective, I think successful businesses will become more data-driven. By leveraging data on consumer trends and tastes, brands can create pieces consumers are more likely to buy. AR and VR will increasingly redefine the online and in-store experience. And high-tech will continue to reshape fashion – for example, catwalks will become increasingly virtual and new innovative functional fabrics will appear. Hong Kong-style is unique, because of the diversity of influences and cultures, as well as our dynamic metropolitan environment.

The post What’s On This Month in the World of Art appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

The Ze/Ro exhibition at Ben Brown Fine Arts is sparked by the idea of an increasingly gender-neutral world.

The curator (an artist herself) Shirky Chan tells us about the Hong Kong women artists featured in the show, whose works explore ideas of femineity and empowerment.

When the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association issued an open call for a potential project for its Summer Programme (which connects member galleries with emerging local artists, curators and art writers), Shirky Chan – herself an artist and curator – answered with a proposal centring on women and gender equality. Chan's idea was to bring together female artists from different generations to explore empowerment, their place within and outside of society, their desired dissolutions of gender, as well as each artist’s unique creative vision.

The association was impressed with her idea and she was invited to visit Ben Brown Fine Arts’ space at The Factory in Wong Chuk Hang, after which she began to approach women artists about being part of the show.

The result is Ze/Ro, which is showing at the gallery until August 26. A showcase of the works of five local women artists, its title is inspired by the use of the gender-neutral pronoun “ze”, rather than “he” or “she”; thus, in place of the apparent male bias in the word “hero”, Chan suggests the non-gender alternative ze/ro.

Of the five artists in the exhibition, Chan Ka Kiu is the youngest and also the only out lesbian – her work is described by Shirky Chan as “post-90s”.

“I think society is more aware of discrimination and gender is not really a restriction or burden to her. Her works are more carefree. That’s why I wanted to choose cross-generational artists in the same show.”

Ka Kiu was around eight years old when she and a friend were both diagnosed with a bone tumour – tragically, her friend died after the tumour became cancerous. Ka Kiu’s tumour has stayed with her all these years, closely monitored through many trips to the hospital.

“The fear of death,” says the artist, “came to me at a very young age.”

The show features four pieces from her series A List of Things to Bring to Paradise. “These are some little things I think are important for my life right now,” says Ka Kiu. “Maybe I’ll go to hell, maybe I’ll make another series.”

Love, Name of a Bird is a headless flapping wooden bird sculpture suspended from the ceiling, pressed against patterned glass and basking in pink-yellow lighting (“like a sunset, like paradise.”). Ka Kiu says this piece is about the first life she took away, a bird that died after it hit her studio window. She heard a large bang in the night and found its body the next morning. “So this bird,” she says about her work, “will never die.”

Her favourite self-created piece is I Wanna Be Your Dog – inflatable dogs with “fragile” stickers attached. “I think everyone has this moment where you just want to be a pet with a nice owner,” she says. And the sticker? “I wanted to stick this label on myself – fragile!”

Ants, in pencil on paper, depicts minuscule hand-drawn insects. “I had to sharpen the pencil constantly. I think ants are a little, tedious, mundane annoyance, so it’s one thing I’d like to bring to paradise. Paradise will be peaceful and just happiness 24/7, so I want to bring something annoying, something not too horrible.”

Ka Kiu’s other featured work is the first thing you see when you walk into the exhibition – an acrylic disinfection box filled with cleaning supplies perched on a metal shelf, that guests can become part of by placing their hands into glove inserts. Titled Pamper Day, the piece reflects handling toxins, things that are contagious – and how we might feel that there are similar things inside ourselves: “I hope when we think something is bad inside, we take a pamper day and take care of it,” she says.

Like Ka Kiu, the artist Christy Chow also has coloured light on her work. Her piece Baby #1 concerns the first of her two miscarriages. “Of course, I was very sad,” she says. “I suddenly realised, ‘I don’t know who I can talk to,’ because this isn’t a topic that people love to talk about – it’s different from your relative or friends passing away. There’s a funeral, there are formal things you can do to grieve. With a miscarriage, there’s basically no grieving at all.”

The piece is in wool – pinched and rolled and unrolled with water and cleaning detergent – pinned on to silk. “It was very labour-intensive and took me about two weeks. I liked the labour – it was like a meditation, the repetition – it was actually the way I grieved,” Chow says.

The last image she saw of her baby was a black-and-white ultrasound. “I don’t think that their life should be that sad, so I tried to give them colour, vivid colour, but matching the same hues of the black and white,” she says.

Chow’s other piece comes from her Disaster series, which is centred on the female body – Chow aims to talk about real bodies and not the “bodies you see in magazines and ads: perfect and hairless”.

“Everything is so natural about the body – menstruation, urine, breastmilk. No one wants to talk about it, but it’s so natural. It’s almost like when you don’t talk about a disaster. It happens in our world – it’s natural.”

Her work Flood, in embroidery on vinyl, shows a woman (“like a goddess, like a Mother Earth”) relaxed on waves, with liquid pouring out from her. This is Chow's way of talking about bodies when society doesn’t want to: “If women don’t talk about it, then who will?” she asks.

Further into the exhibit are two video works by Jess Lau, both of which feature her own hands. Drowning, a fixed stop-motion animation on a projector, consists of a drawing of her right hand, erased and redrawn until the paper wore out. Animators act like a god of their animation, controlling its plot and timing, but Lau says she wanted to loosen her “power” and let ‘time’ decide when the animation would end: when the paper was too worn out to be drawn on again.

Her other work, Handnote, is a video poem made of three parts: a stop-motion animation of her hand, black-and-white film photos she took and a series of women’s hands she found in old Hong Kong advertisements. It’s a collage of sorts displayed on a small television set, which, says Lau, gives the video a special texture that connects different women from different times.

According to the show’s curator, Lau’s pieces focus on the most intimate part of her body, the hands. “She’s using her body, the external, to guide or lead to her inner feelings as to what a woman should be.”

Jaffa Lam and Au Hoi Lam are the two oldest artists featured in Ze/Ro, whose works conform to more traditional fine-art media, says Chan. Jaffa is a sculptor, which the curator says is significant as there’s an assumption that female artists can’t – or won’t – undertake laborious work. But for Jaffa, the wooden medium is no restriction.

Lady/Tree in Travel represents Jaffa herself: it’s the same height, width and weight as she is. The sculpture is made of reworked wood and is displayed in the middle of an open crate – in the past when Jaffa had overseas exhibitions she couldn’t attend, she'd send the tree in her place. On the trunk, three Chinese characters say her name, “work” and “wood”.

As a single unmarried woman without children, Jaffa has fantasised about being pregnant at some stage. Oval Chair is made of an old chair frame, stainless steel and recycled crate wood. Seen from afar, it resembles a throne, with a regal air of elegance (“the way pregnant women should be treated,” says Chan). As you approach it, the rounded red-ball shape looks akin to a swollen pregnant stomach. It’s also a reference to Jaffas candies, sweet and warm, even as the cold stainless steel works against that suggestion.

Coloured with mercurochrome, a compound formerly used as an anaesthetic and dye that's no longer sold because of its high mercury content, Red Balloon is Jaffa’s favourite piece. “A balloon should be soft and fragile, just like women are supposed to be, but actually we’re hard and solid and strong,” says Chan.

Au Hoi Lam’s acrylic paintings on canvas were made 18 years ago. At the time, she’d just completed her master of fine art degree and was experiencing some uncertainty about her future. “The works capture my authentic self at that time,” she says.

Titled Memo, Pink and Blue and The Cradle, the pieces are described by the artist as “transforming inner turbulence through the act of painting, and realising a better state of being”.

Memo and Pink and Blue feature etchings in pencil and ballpen on canvas or linen. According to Chan, they’re “something like a secret code, like diary entries scribbled on canvas. She wants to express but not express at the same time; to let people know what she’s feeling but keep some secrets to herself.”

"Ze/Ro" is showing at Ben Brown Fine Arts, Unit 202, The Factory, 1 Yip Fat Street, Wong Chuk Hang until 26 August. You can find out more here.

The post Dissolutions of Gender: Ze/Ro Exhibition at Ben Brown Fine Arts appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Renowned international gallerist Ben Brown Fine Arts opened his first location in the early 2000s in London’s Mayfair, where the gallery quickly established itself as a point of reference both locally and internationally, especially after setting up its Asian outpost in Hong Kong. Famed for displaying contemporary and 20th-century art by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Lucio Fontana and Alighiero Boetti, Ben Brown recently took on a new challenge when he opened a space in Palm Beach, Florida, though this busy man nonetheless found time to share with Prestige readers his thoughts on the current state of the art world.

Tell us about your upcoming exhibition featuring Frank Auerbach and Tony Bevan.

Frank Auerbach/Tony Bevan: What is a Head? runs at Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong from May 15 until July 3. Curated by art historian Michael Peppiatt, it features two of Britain’s leading figurative painters, Frank Auerbach and Tony Bevan. Through 22 works, it explores
the philosophical question, “What is a head?” which is one of humanity’s most defining features.

In the exhibition, which is a conversation between Auerbach and Bevan, the two artists try to achieve something new and revealing through the same theme. Individually, they possess a powerful and unique style. Together, they represent the rewarding opportunity to look at paintings as a whole, without preconception or previous knowledge – a radical exploration of a theme that involves us all: “What is a Head?”

Throughout your career, one of your main passions – which is now turned into expertise – has been Italian art. Can you tell us more about it?

It’s one of my fortes and what I’m best known for. It’s mostly because I speak Italian and I used to run the Italian department at Sotheby’s in the 1990s. By going to Italy a lot, you become an expert in certain things. I’m an expert in Boetti and Fontana and a few other things.

How has the gallery adapted throughout the pandemic?

It’s been hard in London, because we’ve been completely closed, so we’ve been trying to do as much as we can on screen. We’re all bored with that now, and want to go and see real art. Last year was the first year in my life that I didn’t come to Hong Kong, but managing director Amanda Hon has done very well with the gallery. Hongkongers can’t travel and, to be honest, they’ve been buying art, which is great for us. If you have the right product at the right price then the market’s fine. Overall, the pandemic has forced us to become better in certain areas, but we’ve had to learn to live without art fairs, something that we’re very good at.

Has the pandemic changed art forever?

Quite possibly, yes. It’s definitely changed the world forever, hasn’t it? I don’t think art fairs will be as successful as they used to be. Or maybe, like many companies in other sectors, some will benefit and some will flounder and die. That’s true for galleries too – some have already died, unfortunately. The same can be said about artists, because some don’t come across as being good on screen. So it’s going to be difficult. Some galleries will go back to doing what they were doing before and maybe it won’t work. But we’re ready for the new challenges, whatever they might be.

Has your passion for art helped you to cope with the challenges of the past year?

Yes definitely. When you’re on lockdown, it really helps. If I didn’t have as many artworks on my walls, I don’t think my mental health would be the same.

What do you think of the Beeple NFT sale?

It was a great marketing exercise. The guy, in a way, is a genius – good for him. Here’s an artist that nobody had ever heard of and now he’s worth US$69 million. Everybody’s scratching their head. I don’t think he’s worth that much – to be honest, I think it’s pretty irrelevant. This isn’t about making art, it’s about making money, which is not the traditional reason why art was created – it was about creating something enjoyable for people to look at and feel good about. Now it’s become part of investment portfolios to make money, but it shouldn’t be like that – you should be prepared to lose money. You should be buying exactly what you like and that makes you happy. If a US$69 million Beeple makes you happy, then you should buy it. For people like me, it’s totally irrelevant.

If you could pick an artist from the past to have dinner with, who would it be?

Pablo Picasso. He was a fascinating man with a big brain – a great painter whose career changes throughout his different phases, which I’ve examined and which I’d ask him about. I’d also ask him why he slept with so many women and I’d be fascinated to know whom he was actually in love with.

What’s next for Ben Brown Fine Arts?

We just opened a gallery in a fantastic location in Palm Beach. We’re going to be doing different shows, including Boetti and Warhol. We were looking for a space when the pandemic hit, and we ended up finding one in Florida, where I’m also going to have a partner. I also love going to Palm Beach in winter, which is the season down there. We have a lot of art fairs coming in autumn, which should be very busy for us.

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