Ms.Prada reached out to me through Fondazione Prada after reading an interview of mine, and after a zoom studio visit we sat down at lunch in Bar Luce at the Fondazione. The collaboration started with a good chat.

I love the femininity of the brand’s identity and at a time of radical changes the word femininity itself is up to new interpretations. It now offers many alternatives and is now multidimensional. There’s so much we can do with it.

I didn’t think about what is fashion and what is art, to me there are both very exciting and inspiring – I focused on doing what I usually do, which is to make it make sense to me. Whether fashion or art, they are always up to interpretation of different individuals.

I don’t have a clear idea when it began – we all made drawings and sketches as a kid. For me it was more about writing, I always liked writing and I would write journals, short stories, suicide notes and etc. It kind of just went from there. I don’t have a mentor in the classical sense, but conversations with my friends have always been inspiring to me.

I actually can! I’d like to think my first artwork was an installation I made with my closet while living in a dormitory. The rapid urbanization of China came with constant large-scale demolition of existing buildings and architectures – one would often see buildings being marked 拆,which means to destroy. I made a sign with the character and put it across my closet where the closet doors would open and tear it apart, which was later taken down by a teacher. Situations in the past 3 years, my own lived experience and the collective trauma of being Chinese, made me think about this work a lot, unfortunately pictures of this work were lost due to my other website work, where I uploaded my personal archive for visitors to delete.

Looking back it still feels like a dream – I’ve never done anything on a similar scale, and I’m more than grateful to have this opportunity. I’d like to look at it as a movie, both the show itself and my experience working on it.

The show thematizes the unavoidable inefficiency of communication – what is lost in words, in the glitches of technology, in translation, in speech-to-text dictation, in emojis, in thoughts – and where these missing messages travel to, through installation, moving image, text and soundscape. By lost in transmission, I not only refer to messages that don’t make it through the glitches in communication systems, but also gestures at broader experiences of the inadequacy of communication. Ultimately every message is a translation and expression always bear its own failure, meaning mutates as it leaves the speaker. The show’s melancholic character is marked by glimmers of optimism, in drawing a connection between these missing messages, the communication infrastructure, and planets, I imagine that our words are not lost but rather take on a new form, punctuating the sky.

I haven’t had time to think about it actually!

I can’t foresee how it will go but I hope it can be more radical.