A rough and sudden act of fashion. A political mutiny.
Designer Yie Yie Qiang Yin’s collection ‘untitled white project’ is an artistic fulmination against the downtrodden art education in China, stillborn conceptions of beauty and uncompromising aesthetic values, as well as an engaging meditation on the ephemeral fluidity of life and the inconsistency of post-modernity.
As Yin operates complex patterns to erect an architectural white look, already phenomenal on its own, he shows great understanding of topological mechanisms. Clean, sinuous volumes outline a body that no longer abides to standardized proportions.
However, Yin’s raison d’être rests far beyond intelligent concrete garment construction. Using dry-ice to arouse smoke around his looks, organic and free-form shapes enkindle an impermanent, aporetic semblance, heightening an organic connection between costume and environment.
In 1972, canadian theatre critic and playwright Gary Botting wrote “Happenings abandoned the matrix of story and plot for the equally complex matrix of incident and event”.
And a happening it is! By blurring out the distinguishable silhouette of the body, Yin denounces against the archetypal visual segmentation in scholarly proportion methodologies, that oppressively make art and fashion decipherable, and thus, assessable; seizing to unhitch from limiting aesthetic academism in fashion and art.
Yie Yie Qiang Yin’s ‘untitled white project’ may be a fugacious and unfathomable art happening, but the thrust of it’s happening act is alive and kicking!

Pedro Milanezi