If you asked several fashion critics what they dislike about the industry at the moment, they would probably provide you with the same answer - the relentlessly fast rhythms that are destroying it, while also ruining the mental sanity of many people involved in it. As sponsors spread their tentacles on the various fashion weeks turning fashion into an empty branding exercise, it becomes evident that one thing is missing from many fashion collections (if we do not count the lack of research in general...) – a coherent narration. But could fashion learn a lesson from art? Let's see.
Chinese artist Kan Xuan mainly works with videos, photography and installations. Quite often she focuses on repetitions, creating short vignettes focused on certain objects. At times they have a humorous and ironic twist, at others they explore issues regarding personal identity (like her 1999 "Kanxuan, Ai!" video in which she ran through the Beijing subway tunnels calling out her name) or they are casual and almost meangingless, analysing the futility of carrying out certain actions (her 2002 video "Onion", looks at the futility of peeling apart a pair of onions and trying to reassemble them).
For "Millet Mounds" (2012), currently on display at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale, the artist assembled a series of 207 brief videos looking at Chinese history. The name of the work refers to the nickname given to burial mounds by Northern Chinese villagers (as they resemble harvest-time grain piles).
The videos document imperial tombs in China with a stop-motion technique that consists in stitching together hundreds of individual still photographs. While being a compendium of the ancient past and a catalogue of events seen through a very personal point of view, the assembled videos (shot in hundreds of days during an on-the-road research) represent also a trivial attempt to recover the past.
Xuan's "Millet Mounds" could be interpreted as a sort of narration of sketches in movement, a video tapestry that - though complex and characterised by extremely fast rhythms - still retains a narrative thread and a meaning. Would it be possible for fashion to regain its narrative power even at its fast-paced nature?
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