Curating a vibrant, complicated image of Asia through garments
Growing up as a minority in South London, A Sai Ta, an award-winning British-Asian designer of both Chinese and Vietnamese heritage, has been creating garments promoting the idea of "being seen and creating visibility". Known for his talent for subverting stereotypical Chinese iconography, Ta unabashedly used blue-and-white patterns, dragon motifs, and nunchucks in his designs to externalize his mixed heritage.
Like A Sai Ta, many other participants also translate their Asian heritage into diverse aesthetic signifiers in their works that are not too hard for viewers to pick up on.
For example, both the ink paintings, albeit a bit comic, hanging in the middle of the agnès b jacket and trench coat in The Little Story - 1st and The Little Story - 3rd, two mixed-media artworks by Chinese-Dutch artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang, immediately bring to mind a traditional Chinese painting that dates back a millennium.
