Clothes that speak of craft
Haute couture meets traditional handicrafts and street cultures of yore at a new show in the city’s Heritage Museum. Dara Wang reports.
Tricia Flanagan, originally from Australia and with a doctorate in European arts, created the fashion series, Cricket Songs. Her presentation is a highlight attraction of the Fashion + Paper, Scissors and Rock exhibition now on at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.
It’s a show where sartorial fashion meets visual and sound art, even as it pays a tribute to the craft heritage of Hong Kong and the mainland by remembering some of the much-cherished features of the traditional popular culture practices in these places.
The chirping of crickets can be heard in the background as one tours Flanagan’s part of the show. They seem to come from the rattan and bamboo cages displayed on the mannequins. Flanagan said the Chinese fascination with crickets inspired her to come up with this artistic experiment.
Flanagan’s creations are a throwback to the Chinese tradition of raising small and easy-to-care-for plant and animal life at home, often summed up as hua niao yu chong (flower, bird, fish, insect in Chinese). Keeping crickets used to be a common practice in China not too long ago. “The Chinese would take their pet crickets out for walks in a container. While men played board games in the park, they would hang these cages on a tree to listen to their songs,” Flanagan said.
It’s a practice clearly on its way out. So Flanagan is trying to revive these increasingly distant cultural memories by recreating some of the sounds associated with them. Two cages are hung on either side of a thin truck balanced on a fashion model’s head. As visitors to the show walk past the figure, the sensors inside the cages switch on a recording of the ambient sounds that one might hear in a park during a lazy summer afternoon. These include the twittering of birds and chirping of crickets, among others.
The designer ’s interest in Chinese landscape painting is evident throughout the collection. She has borrowed extensively from traditional Chinese landscape paintings, featuring mountains, rivers and waterfalls — a style that has endured across almost 1500 years, longer than any visual art genre in Western culture.
“I selected paintings with foregrounds featuring forest and ‘earth-bound’ objects, and where the middle plane represents emptiness in the form of mist or water to represent the silence of nature,” says Flanagan.
The patterns used in each costume are meant to conjure up a feeling of quietude and visual tranquility.
Art in life
Flanagan has teamed up with rattan weaver Chan Chor-kiu to design and create rattan handicrafts, with a view to “bringing life and fashion together”.
Rattan-weave products are a specialty of southern China including Guangdong province. These come in a huge varie ty of shapes and sizes from small cricket cages to voluminous baskets. However, the popularity of light and inexpensive plastic alternatives has pushed rattan products out of the market almost entirely.
Flanagan aims to regenerate this traditional craft style by mixing it with modern sartorial fashion. An over-sized rattan basket carried by a model on her back looks like she has sprouted wings and wearing an exaggerated ruff around the neck as they sometimes do on the runway.
Aside from rattan, Flanagan dresses up the presentation of her clothes and artwork by adding cages, pots and tickling tools for the pet crickets. These are made of sandalwood, jade and bamboo. “As some of these craft forms are near-extinct, it is hard to find artisans who still make them. So we bought some of the traditional artifacts used in the show from antique shops and bird markets on the Chinese mainland,” she said.
For example, the 50 cricket cages used to embellish a Chinese long dress by constructing an elaborate ball gown-style peplum at the back of the skirt were purchased from street vendors.
C h a n i s a l i tt l e s a d t h a t young people do not see rattan-weaving skills as a source of livelihood any more. “Weaving rattan could give you cuts and bruises. And what’s worse, there’s not much profit to be made from practicing such a craft,” said Chan.
For several decades, Chan has kept working hard to develop new products and adhere closely to the time-tested techniques to be able to pass these on to the next generation. Chan recalled that once an overseas Chinese brought over a broken rattan chair left to him by his late parents all the way from the UK with a request to him to repair it. “The client was so happy to find me because only a few people now have this skill,” said Chan, who of course was delighted that he could help preserve both familial and cultural memory.
Chan’s nephew is eager to learn the craft of rattan-weaving from him and use it to create newer art forms. “His learning passion has spurred me to continue working at this,” Chan said. “I believe that more and more young people will begin to recognize the importance of this skill, and that they will be willing to learn it,” Chan said.