Artistic avant-garde
Zhao Tong
Zhao Tong studied women's wear at Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts, followed by a master's degree in space studies from the Royal Central Academy of Theatre and Speech, and a master's degree in women's wear from the London School of Fashion. She founded the hexagon collective art studio, which has designed and produced runway performances at Paris Fashion Week, London Fashion Week and Shanghai Fashion Week, and her spatial installations have been shortlisted for the Tower Bridge Public Art Project in London and the Pink Floyd Art Installation in Cambridge.
On December 21, 2017, the "Boundary Breaking/Bazaar 150th Anniversary Fashion Art Exhibition", produced by Harper's Bazaar and curated by YT, opened at moca Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai. Across the beijing and Chengdu touring exhibitions, the "Boundary Breaking /Bazaar 150th Anniversary Fashion Art Exhibition" finally came to Shanghai. While reviewing harper's bazaar's 150-year history, the "Breaking boundaries / bazaar 150th Anniversary Fashion Art Exhibition" also uses harper's bazaar perspective to look back at the century-old fashion history and pay tribute to the times.
Hexagon Collective Studio, especially on the opening day of the show, brings a mesmerizing artistic performance to the Asian fashion metropolis of Shanghai.
Female dancers dressed in simple, avant-garde fashion perform selflessly in each chapter of the exhibition, repeating their dance moves intently in a fixed space. Dancers who are fully immersed in self-awareness use musical melodies and body movements to silently explore the three-dimensional relationship between body and fashion, fashion and art.
Behind the scenes, YT exclusively interviewed Zhao Tong, the founder of Hexagon Collective Studio, who also works as a scene designer, director, and producer. Talk about her studio and the artistic visual experience she uses her three-dimensional and rich learning and work experience to bring to the entire fashion industry.
YT: Can you briefly introduce yourself and your dance team?
Zhao Tong: With my intuitive love for body drama and theater, I turned to theatre creation after completing my master's degree in ldf women's wear. Since 15 years, he has been doing some experimental and theatrical cross-field performances in the fashion show, combining his own fashion background to make emotional, narrative, and physical visual links. In the performance, the performer dressed as a designer communicates directly with the audience's body with his body, including ideas, emotions, stories, external or psychological situations.
The performance team will work with different artists according to different projects, often including former dancer/choreographer Anna Herrmann of NDT1, British dancer Eve stainton, NDT1 dancer Alice Godfrey, and Twins dancer Maria & Nadezhda living in Shanghai.
Hexagon collective dancer Eve Stainton performs fashion shorts for designer brand Fengyi tan's Spring '17 collection
YT: In the performance of hexagon collective, there will be many installation artworks that cooperate with artists, and you will also wear designer brand fashion works.
Zhao Tong: Hexagon collective has cooperated with fashion brands including fengyi tan, wanbing huang, xu zhi, youjia jin.
The Fengyi Tan SS18 collection by hexagon collective
In the performance of this exhibition, artist Maria Paneta and Ava Aghakouchak's 'sarotis' interactive soft machine installation project are used, which inflates the human body after sensing touch to form a squeeze on the human body, bringing the dancer a local discomfort and triggering more 'controllable' body narrative language, expressing the transition from 'touch' to 'control', 'gentle' to 'dangerous'.
This time, he also collaborated with Becky Hong, the designer of The Royal Arts, to design "in hamony", completing a surreal visual presentation of Margaret. Four performers wear a hat that resembles a cloud with four top hats, and moves up and down the curved ramp in a line. Dancers slide freely out of the queue, do some improvisational solo, and wander away from the 'everyday' and 'regular' life.
Hexagon Collective collaborated with Becky Hong to design In Hamony
In addition, the interactive architecture studio team of friends Charlie Zhang was invited to design and produce the mirror-kaleidoscope interactive installation and the interactive installation of 'Triangular Breathing Space'.
YT: Before the Boundary Breaker/Bazaar 150th Anniversary Fashion Art Exhibition, what other fashion shows did hexagon collective work with?
Zhao Tong: At the Fall/Winter 2017 Men's Week in Paris, hexagon collective tried for the first time, bringing dancers and models together as performers, bringing a two-hour immersive fashion show "rÉcrÉation". The performance, in the two-story space of the Elephant Paname Art Center in Paris, shows the innocence and absurdity of childhood, presenting 11 scenes in the form of site-spesfic. This fashion show is in collaboration with designer brand Youjia Jin. We did a similar show twice at London Fashion Week, once with iQiyi on the theme of mother and daughter, and the other was more interesting, looping 8 limb plays in the old cloakroom in the London Masonic building. Both performances follow the way dancers work with models. The twice-time fashion show at Shanghai Fashion Week was in collaboration with the fengyi tan brand, and the finished form of SS18 shifted from immersive performances to theater performances on four-sided stages.
Hexagon collective performs "rÉcrÉation" at Paris Men's Week fall/winter 2017
YT: Can you tell us about the performances in this boundary-breaking/bazaar 150th anniversary fashion art exhibition?
Zhao Tong: The performance "physical fragments" was based on six different chapters of the exhibition, and six different immersive theater concept performances were performed in the division. The audience walks around the exhibition space at will and randomly 'encounters' a "performance".
Among them, in the theme chapter of "Belle Epoque", I want to use pure limb and limb mirror relationship to represent the reflection of one body attached to or parasitic to another body, visually expressing the reflection of classical dance postures such as ballet. The space of this performance I chose is in the circular area, and its own cyclical nature creates the rhythm and sense of time of the performance, with two dancers chasing each other within the ring, clinging to each other, and fleeing from each other. While conceiving the plan, I also decided to complete the performance with the concept costume of the Fengyi Tan brand and twins dancers.
Twins dancer Maria & Nadezhda
YT: In this boundary-breaking/bazaar 150th Anniversary Fashion Art Exhibition opening performance, there was an interesting interaction between the art performances of the hexagon collective and the works of several other artists, is this the first time you have encountered a situation? Or what kind of experience have you had before?
Zhao Tong: Yes, the performance area was fully determined the day before the performance, and the performance of the rebellious era was in the space of the artist Liu Jianhua's installation "Black Flame", and the performance coincided with this space in the "spirit". I also felt before that the performance would "come alive" when it encountered a certain space, and different spaces would also create different situations to make the performance reasonable and possible.
Hexagon collective performance with Liu Jianhua's installation "Black Flame"
YT: Over the past 150 years, Harper's Bazaar has led women to find their own free lives, what do you think of this magazine and the great women who have worked for it?
Zhao Tong: Harper's bazaar has played a very important role in leading women's self-awareness awakening over the past century, while also providing women with full self-excavation and self-worth in the professional field. Then, the great woman who has worked for her must be in line with her in temperament and energy, with different or advanced views and courage, and use her own energy to promote change.
YT: You and your team are predominantly women, how do you see female artists, female designers, and the power of women?
Zhao Tong: I didn't deliberately look for the identity of women, but most of the designers I have worked with are women. The starting point of the work will mostly be some emotions, concepts, rhythms, relationships and other more emotional or abstract things, which is difficult to express with logic, and the delicacy of emotional communication is very demanding, and most of the cooperation is women's wear brands, which is also a limitation.
I think first of all to recognize and respect their own social identity, respect for the transformation of women's roles in society, as for female artists/designers, female power, I don't feel the need to make a special distinction with men, deliberately add a "female" prefix to emphasize the power of women, in my opinion, good artists in all combine male and female characteristics.
Zhao Tong and the dancers of the hexagon collective
YT: Fashion is going through a period of change, and your work is closely related to fashion, how do you see these changes, such as the influence of social networks, the influence of opinion leaders on fashion.
Station: To see which aspect of this change refers to specifically, the change will bring new vitality, I am looking forward to these changes can bring more possibilities to the fashion industry, fashion itself should be diverse and inclusive. As far as I am concerned, I will pay more attention to sustainable fashion, its meaning and form can help more people, and fashion should also pay more attention to life itself.