Fashion Exhibition by Sun Young Choi
This exhibition is an outcome of thinking about fashion and mentality that elicits a tension between matter and mind, and secular and sacred, respectively.
Images dominate our current era. Knowingly or unknowingly, we are captivated by images, which hold sway over our thoughts and behaviours. Living in this era that overflows with myriad images, we can see the way images drive our desires and how desperately we cling to the virtual world.
Adrian Piper, an American philosopher, said that there is a close relationship between the 1960s and the first decade of the new millennium, and characterized that relationship with an emphasis on images. Piper then added that what drove the renaissance of images in the 1960s was the psychedelia.
If psychedelics were the spiritual basis of the 1960s, what is or should be its basis in the modern-day world?
I define the association between the 1960s and this decade as the emphasis on images and the pursuit of mentality. In expressing the connection between the two time periods in clothing, I have expressed not the giddy and nauseating psychedelic images, but the transcendentality or mentality of the images as converted by the light by combining the visual illusion that is emphasized in visual art as part of psychedelic art and the images of radiating strokes of light that spread out in all directions.
Since ancient times, light has served as a figurative essence that symbolizes the divinity of the absolute being. In Christianity, too, light is the most important essence, as it connects heaven and earth, the sacred and the secular. The early Greek fathers of the Orthodox Church thought that as beauty itself, God mediated between us and the ideal world through the symbol of physical or spiritual light. They believed that light occurred on earth from the discharge of light as such, that the divine beauty of heaven could be re-enacted through the splendour of colour and the physical luxury that symbolized light, and souls could be elevated through such re-enactment.
A total of eighteen outfits were designed to remind modern-day digital natives not of the negative aspects of images, but of the beauty and innate meaning of light as the origin that creates images by expressing the longing for the absolute and spiritual beauty that is symbolized by light.
Specifically, I have used a moiré fringe and pronounced effect as my motifs in developing designs. To highlight the theme by tapping into these two effects, I have developed clothing with unique layered structures with a printed pattern.
In The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger said, “Beauty is the way in which truth occurs as unconcealment.” Similarly, I hope the light of revelatory truth that the invisible God as the transcendental being presents to us will reveal something of itself through this collection.