Print

Mail

wiki links

Designers fuse the past and present at Palace Museum

Taiwanese designers staged an exhibition at the National Palace Museum yesterday showing off their responses to an artistic challenge: To create avant-garde fashion, household goods and toys based on objects from the museum's collection.

"Today's classic was yesterday's avant-garde. And today's avant-garde could be tomorrow's classic," said National Palace Museum director Lin Man-li (林曼麗) at the event, encouraging designers to keep culture alive by combining influences from the past and present.

Some pieces from the show, which was called "Old is New," are slated for mass production, which means that visitors to the National Palace Museum could soon be able to bring the designs home with them.

The event began with a short dance performance that was meant to capture the concept of "Old is New." A male dancer dressed in a half-unbuttoned shirt represented modernity, while a female dancer in Peking Opera costume represented the past.

Major Taiwanese design teams participated in the event. Chen Ren-yi (陳仁毅) of Art of Chen contributed a collection of spare, elegant furniture and housewares which combine Song Dynasty aesthetics with a modern, minimalist sensibility. Paris-based design duo Jian Yu-feng (簡鈺峰) and Shawn Pan (潘伯勳) of Shawnyi brought glamor to the show with their richly embroidered evening wear and handbags, claiming inspiration from Tang Dynasty paintings or palace scenes.

Toy designers from Pumpkin Creative tapped into the current craze for collectible dolls and created cartoon-style dolls based on images from the past. The museum's famous jade cabbage sculpture is represented as a little white dog with a cabbage head.

There were also designs at the event that are not slated for mass production.

Among the more conceptual exhibits was a fishbowl using a geomancy chart design, shrink-wrap printed with patterns from vases in the museum's collection that could be applied to household objects and an outsized sugar cube that, when dissolved, reveals a replica of the museum's famed boat carved out of an olive pit, which then floats to the top of the cup.

According to Ginger Chang (常靜潔) of the Taiwan Design Center, the executive unit for this event, merchandise in the show could hit the museum shop's shelves in as little as six months.
This story has been viewed 1905 times.