Team trip to Hua Hin, December 2023

We spent time in Seoul this week for a fashion project. Between research and retail observations we held lots of pop-up analysis sessions in Seoul's many coffee shops and listening bars.

In popular style and culture areas like Seongsu-Dong we noticed evolving trends in vintage clothing selections and bakery themes, but the most acutely visible theme was the dialogue between brands' increasing urban media presence and the gentrification of traditional industrial areas.

As an example, a Burberry exhibition straddling several unused buildings and featuring the Norman's Café installation that has been heavily criticised in the UK for 'cosplaying the working class' sits literally a unit away from a metalsmith and repair shops. With this in mind, Burberry's approach does feel deliberately provocative; perhaps riffing on their own conflicted relationship with class (with questionable success). It feels markedly different from other forms of civic branding strategies we see from luxury brands.

Take Louis Vuitton, who are currently partnering with the newly opened Fotografiska in Shanghai. The strategy centres on an extension of their City Guide series and branding transportation like the Suzhou Creek boat stops. Like their events in other cities like Qingdao, the brand 's approach is more civic - choosing to celebrate the places that can bring inhabitants of cities together across a range of cultural destinations, rather than further expose the economic and identity fault lines that divide them.

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The film 'In Her Time' by Diane Severin Nguyen posits practice as performance. The artist / actress skips through personal memory and collective history, with rehearsal as a means to confront trauma and the re-enactment of pain an end to expression. The narrative relays a struggle and ultimately a convergence between the private world of her nostalgically lit and soundtracked bedroom and the production of her character in a war movie filmed at Hengdian Film and Television City. Themes of historical narratives, violence, and desire are explored in the repetitive loops of her spoken lines and circular experiences.

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“An arcade is a city, a world in miniature.”

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

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Four advertisements from the early 20th century, Paris. Especially noticeable are the cartooned figures of military prowess, choices of maroon, grey, and off-white, array of carefully picked, carefully set fonts, and classical figures representing war and peace in the backdrop - visual codes that are foreign yet refreshing to the Chinese eye. A portrait of the city's morale and eco-political mental space in between the two world wars - the liminal space of peace, powered by intellectual, artistic engines of development and modernization. Snapped from the two-floored exhibition of Paris Modern: 1915-1945 (Power Station), an exhibit that invites viewers to compare modern Paris with 20th century Shanghai while reflecting on modernistic diversity, how "humanities and the arts" contribute "to a city's historical transformation."

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Fishermen on Suzhou Creek. In summers past, children would try to grab a watermelon from the barges bringing produce, according to local residents.

'Traveling in the Dark', an art project conceived by film director, poet, writer, anthropologist, sound composer, literary and art theoretician, Trinh T Minh-ha, specifically designed for Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. It is a visual, sonic, poetic and philosophical experience that explores themes around “reality”, re-representation, and knowledge production. Excerpts from her writings were "exhibited", complementing her experimental film essays shown in makeshift dark rooms. "The unknown, like the fantastic, is never merely out there," she writes. In what way can the dark open up spaces of unsuspected visibilities, of active resistance and of solitary connivances? "It is always already here, there, where one neglects to look with eyes wide shut."

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New Man 新人 by 商亮 at Made In Gallery. These large-scale paintings recall the super strength mode of an Anime transformation sequence and for me raise comparisons about current online discourse about hyper masculinity and identity.

At Ed Atkins's exhibition 'Refuse' at Tank Shanghai, a computer simulated and animated "list" or iteration of wastes (like broken furniture, dead fish and shredded paper) falls through forms a heap of rubbish. In an interview, the artist says while the emphasis is the list itself, the intention is also to create "a play of unwanted things returning".

"It is of ultimate importance today to ask how modernity can be overcome from a non-European perspective. One such possibility can be found in reflecting on the varieties of aesthetic and technological experience in order to rearticulate a program after the postmodern"

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