Ruiyu Zheng @zhenr016 is a Parsons MFA student who recently presented her first full collection. The collection is called the Wooden Garden and is based around traditional Chinese motifs carved out of cork. I had the pleasure of talking to her and I’m pleased to give her voice a platform. This interview was conducted by my talented intern Ross Moser @ross_moser_
To start, did you grow up around lots of crafts? It’s clearly very integral to your work.
Yes. I grew up in a family with a family job in the art area. My grandfather is a restoration worker, who is good at restoring historical artwork. The characteristic of his work is that the more successful the job is, the less obvious it is to the audience. Also, my grandpa is good at making crafts by hand. Growing up in such an environment, I have a talent for learning handmade skills.
Your work is extremely sculptural, and very informed by your heritage, as you’ve stated before. Is there a specific style of traditional Chinese sculpting that informs the designs you integrate in your garments?
Yes, it’s actually my own story. I hope I can share my personal experience when I was a young designer and resonate with more people. My family is the inheritance family of intangible cultural heritage. In my previous projects, I have integrated China’s traditional handicrafts and culture into my projects. Because of my background, I will always consciously and unconsciously integrate China’s traditional culture. I have always hoped to find a balance between tradition and modernity. It is a topic that I hope I can explore for a long time when I try to incorporate culture as inspiration and story.
With the collection being titled “Wooden Diary,” was any look modelled after a specific experience of yours? Or is it a broader exploration of your lived experiences?
I want to be a storyteller in the fashion industry. What I do is an expression that is channeled through my own background. The story in my project originated from my family heritage. It tells the story of my childhood, how I was raised, and the way I think of my life and the world.
As I mentioned before, the characteristic of my grandfather’s work is that the more successful the job is, the less obvious it is to the audience. Thus as a fashion designer, I hope I could reveal and advertise different types of traditional art works to bring them on the table through fashion, letting more people know those skills and the stories behind them and the stories behind them. Every time I searched in exhibitions for crafts and modern designs, I found that there is much to be built by machines. However, crafting with one’s own hands draws more attention to one object. I enjoyed these exhibitions not only for the texture and crafts, but also interested in sculpture furniture and space relationships. Because of my own growing up environment, it is a diary to record my own story. And the family furniture has become a carrier which is a very important element of the whole story.
For my project, I would like to integrate the Chinese traditional skill and furniture into fashion in a new way. About the pattern of wood carving, there are traditional China architecture scenery and New York street scenes. The inspiration is almost from the change and observation of my living place in the past two years. I hope that traditional crafts will not only engage in traditional graphics, but will resonate with more people from different backgrounds, and the skill could seek a balance between tradition and modernity.
I hope my collection is about going back to a level of craftsmen, every piece is with a unique texture and has emotional content. In the process of combining furniture elements and garment structure, I found the collections’ silhouette to express my story. And I hope that my story could let fashion, as a human connection, integrate craft, an emotional craft through objects.
I love how you blend the lines between sculpture and garment. Are there any designers who inspired you take that direction, or did it arise from a different source?
I really get inspiration from Do Ho Suh , Christo and Hussein Chalayan . Do Ho Suh is a Korean artist who left his native South Korea to study and live in the United State and later moved between New York, Seoul and London, and the enduring theme of the artist’s practice is the connection between the individual and the group across global cultures. As the background , I am inspired by the project he made “the house which could be taken away.” Christo and Jeanne-Claude commented on the tourists and the purists. I enjoyed and got the inspiration that they use the fabric to play with the buildings and environment. Hussein Chalayan had an incredible fashion show to put the furniture on the body !
I love different ways to show the garment instead of the normal runway show. I also like different kinds of exhibitions with traditional backgrounds but show in a modern fashion. Sometimes I just imagine that maybe if I put my garment on the ground it will not know what it is ,but it could be put on the body or the furniture.
Are there any crafted objects in your life that you constantly derive inspiration from? Do you plan on continuing to work exclusively with garments and sculpture blended, or do you think you’ll separate the two at one point?
My grandfather built his own studio at home ,so he made a lot of furniture by hand in our house. Some chairs have different unique shapes to facilitate his work better. I believe these are the crafted objects that I constantly derive my inspiration from, as it’s the wisdom of the craftsman.
Actually, I always hope that I can continue to work exclusively with garments and sculptural blends. But I don’t want to deliberately connect the two points. It’s good if they show up together at the right time. Maybe fabric can give furniture more possibilities. I also have an ideal plan, which is to make second-hand clothes into small furniture, especially those clothes that have particular meaningful values or those people no longer need. The garment will continue to exist at home in other shapes. It can also be helpful for environmental sustainability, or it can be a value for emotion to be sustained on goods. Additionally, I got interested in sculpture shapes with emotional values. I managed to craft some accessories for daily use (I will show the picture ) to combine some fashion terms and ideas with traditional handicraft skills. It is also for exploring the infinite creative possibilities for my design paths in the future.
Do you ever think about the financial side of the fashion industry?
As technology and the digitalization of modern society develops, industrial production marks the promotion and boost of economics, which leads to cheaper and faster production of fashion design products. However, this would to some extent deviate people’s focus from traditional handicrafts. This leads to the question of what are those things that could never be replicated by machines under the fast wheel of modernization. To me, I think the long-lived history and culture of the inherited handicraft technique, as well as the emotions and memories behind the crafted products, could never be replicated. My previous design collection “Trace of restoration” featured the restoration process of precious historical artworks, like Chinese paintings and calligraphies. I integrated the restoration works into fashion designs so as to let people know more about the restoration field and the culture behind it. I think it is a great opportunity and social responsibility for me to bring those motorized art fields to public sights and raise people’s attention to those sunset fields.
I would want to infuse my works with my personal experiences and traditional culture, to trigger the publics’ curiosity and shared memories of those handicrafts, to resonate with the audiences, and to spark new understandings and interests of the traditional culture.
The mass production of fast fashion designs leads to a fast pace of development and iterations in the fashion industry. But I also feel that some of the values within the designs should be settled as time flows, which could not be achieved through fast fashion. It takes time for a “good” design to thrive, and the excessive information on social media ruined the “happiness of anticipation” for new products. Sometimes it might not be good to always expedite the release of new designs instead of giving the fashion industry a moment to breathe.