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Article on the exhibit:
Chanel’s bag art swings into Asia
Chanel’s mobile
art container unveiled last week in Hong Kong introduces a radically new idea: a rare homage in the art world to designer handbags.
Handbags are mobile items used for carrying things so the format of the show, also quite rare, is appropriate.
The exhibition is on display at the Star Ferry car park beside the harbor.
The original idea came from Chanel’s
creative chief, Karl Lagerfield.
“
Fashion and luxury are taxes of vanity.
We are now returning these taxes to the artists and architects,” said Lagerfield, describing Chanel’s frequent collaborations with artists at last year’s Venice Biennale as an act of social obligation.
The mobile pavilion that sits on
top of the Star Ferry terminal building is a white, organic, shell-like landmark made of fiberglass.
It was designed by award-winning architect Zaha Hadid to look like a UFO.
The concept evolved from Hadid’s trademark spiral designs, a concept the Iraqi-born architect used for “Metronymic Landscape,” a recent project for a fashion complex in Seoul’s Dongdaemun earlier this year.
The pavilion in Hong Kong houses installations by 20 cutting-edge international artists, including Yoko Ono, Pierre et Gilles and Korean artist Lee Bul.
Each worked on ideas inspired by Chanel’s quilted handbags, the brand’s emblematic product for decades.
Ono has invited visitors to write their wishes on a “Wishing Tree” in the main hall.
At the end of the show, the wishes will be sent to the “Imagine Peace Tower” in Iceland as part of the artist’s project for the multimedia art movement Fluxus.
Lee Bul presented a monumental sculpture crowned with hundreds of reassembled bags and chains.
Blue Noses, the Russian art collective, mocked the fashion world’s obsession for bags in sketches depicting a post-apocalyptic world of fashion in “Fifty Years after Our Common Era, or Handbags’ Revolt.”
Chanel’s partnership with artists is not the industry’s first to mix fashion and art.
The contemporary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami came up with a handbag motif for Louis Vuitton, and Pierre Huyghe designed a changing room for Dior.
But the show resonates because it renews the spirit of fashion legend Coco Chanel, who based her design concepts on exchanges with artists like Picasso and Igor Stravinksy.
The show in Hong Kong ends on April 5 and then travels to Tokyo, New York, London, Moscow and Paris.
Admission is free, but reservations are required.
Korean-language information is at
www.chanel-mobileart.com.
By Park Soo-mee Staff Reporter [myfeast@joongang.co.kr]
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