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Fashion (MA)

Yan Han

Yan Han is a womenswear designer based in China, her design has been exploring the relationship between female and social symbols. During this year, she explored new forms of feminism in China. She hopes to express contemporary Chinese women's independent consciousness, female identity. She has been also trying to dilute the label of women's 'identity' , walk out of the power ideology of 'identity', and enter the life discussion of 'women' themselves.

Degree Details

School of Design

Fashion (MA)
Yan Han

My project investigated the history and development track of Chinese feminine art, and pondered its future development trend. Chinese feminine art has gone through several stages after the 1990s.

The early 1990s was the awakening moment of Chinese women's identity,but the theme mainly showed the virtuous image of oriental women and the "iron girl" style. The issue of female identity based on gender consciousness was put forward in the mid-1990s, the issue of female had a broader historical dimension and cultural standpoint. With the introduction of discourse power and identity consciousness, the topic of gender gained a contemporary perspective. In the late 1990s, female artists were able to express their ideas and feelings more freely. Their works were direct and sharp reaching a kind of pleasure in releasing the sadness of life. But these works excluded all male perspective and aesthetic vision. Visual space, psychological space, emotional space had a strong closure. In this closed space, even if this phantom, isolated "private space" reflected women's inner strength, it also reflected women's powerlessness and despair in the male-dominated society.

Fierce confrontation is easy to fall into the logic of duality and closed space is easy to slide into nihilism. I no longer use the painful expression and strong resistance like in the early Chinese feminine art, using the body as a battlefield to make art works. In that period, female artists were "crazy" to "defend" their own values. But I used more rational way to create. The female power I want to express is rational, honest, comfortable, natural, stable and peaceful.

The dots are originally graphics without any meaning, the rearranged dots form the metaphor in my design. I want to erase the female body and replace it with meaningless dots. Let the viewer vaguely see the characteristic of the female body, but from other points of view, just arranged dots, forming a visual illusion.

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