From East To East

A new art & fashion pop-up exhibition
celebrating China’s new age on global-local-lisation

For this year’s London Fashion Week, FUN is celebrating the cultural exchange between East and West,curating FROM EAST TO EAST, a landmark exhibition and pop-up boutique on London’s Brick Lane.

With China’s ever-growing economic power, comes a new explosion of Chinese ideas and culture on the world stage, making great impact on fashion and design.Chinese brands and designers are increasingly making their presence felt, influencing their Western counterparts and producing a vibrant and exciting synthesis that’s wholly new in our shared histories.

In our globalized world, the meeting of local and international can produce new and fascinating cultural expressions, as the global is translated for local conditions, and nation-spanning ideas are adapted for local practices and culture. What would once have taken years to be communicated can now travel the world in the blink of an eye, and as a result, ideas are cross-pollinating at a pace never seen before. Where once cultures remained distinct, the 21st century will be marked by the interaction of these cultural communities, as they fuse and combine to offer exciting new possibilities.

With that in mind, FROM EAST TO EAST will showcase an exciting juxtaposition of East and West aesthetics.

On display will be 47 sculptures by the American designer and artist Jason Freeny – who’s worked with everyone from Jeff Koons to Disney. Riffing off the Asian passion for collectible figurines, Freeny has produced dozens of figurines of iconic characters from popular culture, but with a twist: their anatomical structures are exposed. The most striking of all will be his rendering of Garfield, everyone’s favourite lazy cat, standing almost two metres tall.

Representing China, will be a capsule collection from FUN, a street fashion brand launched  in 1985. As Chinese millennials embrace fashion on a scale never before seen, the brand has become phenomenally popular in the Far East, and is the first Chinese commercial street fashion brand to showcase during London Fashion Week. In the spirit of making the global local, FUN is inspired by urban looks from the west, with a Chinese twist, introducing cartoon characters inspired by their popularity in the East. The styles may be global, but the emphasis remains local, with the key shoot for FROM EAST TO EAST’S capsule collection taking place, not at the bustling fashion centres of Beijing and Shanghai, but the quieter college town of Xiamen, where China’s young gather to create the culture of their country’s future.Xiamen and its universities are central to China’s embrace of our sustainable future, so the exhibition will also be structured around milk crates – which will be available for visitors to take home after the show.

An inspiring panel will lead discussions on globalisation and how social, local and global influences impact consumer choice, design and trends. Speakers will include; Nancy Johnston, Founder and Director of Tengri, a British knitwear label, social enterprise and vanguard in the technical development of noble yak yarns from Mongolia. 

Joining Nancy are the Editor-At-Large of High Snobiety, the online lifestyle news site covering youth trend and culture, and Joon Ian Wong, European Technology Reporter for Quartz News discussing on the European and Chinese technology trends.

FROM EAST TO EAST press night will be at the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane E1 on the evening of 15th of September, 2016, and we’d love to have you there from 6pm 

Please email info@freshmess.co for more details.