Guo Pei
For Guo Pei, China’s ‘Queen of Couture’, the artistry of creating a work means striving for something beyond fashion – beyond the physical world, even. VAULT spoke to the artist and designer at the opening of her exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki – Guo Pei: Fashion, Art, Fantasy 郭培:时装之幻梦 – a scintillating showcase of her visual language, which seeks the eternal through the wearable medium.
Image credit: Guo Pei, The Da Jing (Magnificent Gold), 2006. Photo: LIAN Xu. Courtesy of LIAN Xu © Guo Pei
With a twinkle in her eye, Guo Pei recounts a moment of deep connection between herself and the cosmos, an experience of divine creative energy that surged through her as she was designing her Legends haute couture collection (Spring 2017).
“The way the inspiration came to me was almost like divination from heaven,” she says.
“It was so strong. I couldn’t have come up with it by myself. It poured into me from the universe and it’s almost unexplainable.”
Even to the technically trained eye, the Chinese artist and designer’s creations do seem inexplicable. They appear as impossible feats of form, fabrication and embellishment that have seemingly descended to earth from some otherworldly realm as fully resolved sculptures that also happen to be wearable. In a new exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Guo Pei: Fashion, Art, Fantasy 郭培:时装之幻梦, over sixty of these sculptural works, created between 2005 and 2020, showcase the full splendour of Pei’s mystical creative intuition and technical haute couture prowess.
Curated by Margaret Young-Sanchez, the show explores thematic narratives central to Guo Pei’s couture practice including nature, mythology, European culture and, of course, Asian culture, history and traditions. Through a series of interconnected galleries, visitors are immersed in an evolutionary voyage framed by the workings of Pei’s boundless imagination, her cultural influences, her research, her lived experiences and her spiritual encounters. From playful dream worlds, cosmic motifs and an enduring ‘East meets West’ fascination to more ... Subscribe to read this article in full
