‘Deranged beauty’: how Hong Kong fashion designer Yeung Chin came to love the combination of opposing aesthetics
- Avant-garde fashion designer Yeung Chin started appreciating the interlacing of beauty and ugliness after watching the film ‘Pastoral: To Die in the Country’
- For his fashion shows, he says the beauty of traditional models does not attract him – he prefers models with different body shapes and personalities
Experimental filmmaker, dramatist, poet and photographer Shuji Terayama’s film Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) is a bizarre, metatextual, phantasmagoric recreation of his own rural childhood; it is told as the story of a fictional director trying to reimagine his own childhood in film, such that it is often impossible to know what’s fact and what’s fiction.
Avant-garde Hong Kong fashion designer Yeung Chin, whose work deconstructs and reconfigures traditional styles of clothing, playing with unusual silhouettes and materials, tells Richard Lord how it changed his life.
I first saw the film when I was around 18 or 19 years old, because Silvio Chan showed it to us when I was studying fashion design. He was a professor at PolyU (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) but also organised Alternatif Workshop, a private fashion school in his studio.
Every week I had a tutorial with him; he was a mentor in the fashion business. He just showed us a few minutes from the film, and told us the director was a great film artist.
I thought it was really interesting and searched for him, and then spent a whole week watching his films. Every one of them impressed me very much. I had never been exposed to such deranged beauty.
I did not understand the content of the movie at all, because the first time I watched it was in Japanese. But the deepest feeling I got was from the flawless setting and the chemistry formed by the mismatch of characters.