Jueqian Fang & Hongzhe Liang
Vanity Show: Perhaps...
November 29, 2019 – January 4, 2020
Sharing the dreaded experience of luxury handbag shopping for family and friends in China who crave for status items, we felt compelled to start designing and making handbags to redirect that experience. Built on shared personal stories and cultural predicaments, Perhaps… proposes alternatives to what our moms and their girlfriends find desirable. Newly affluent Chinese females are reshaping important aspects of consumer culture in China, which nonetheless remains rooted in colonial history and the Chinese communist slogan “surpassing Great Britain and catching up with the United States” from the Great Leap Forward campaign. The coveted European and American designer bags are not only symbolic items for social status—as proof that “we are as good/rich as the westerners/whites”—but also something so widely distributed in China now that almost everyone we know back home owns a Louis Vuitton/Gucci/Coach/Michael Kors bag, either fake or genuine. Perhaps… is our comment regarding this particular narrative.
- Jueqian Fang & Hongzhe Liang
This project was supported, in part, by a grant from 4Culture.
