Jiayu Guo
My Wonderland
Class of: 2024
Major: Fashion Design BFA
Medium: Video, fashion design, paper
Faculty: Studio: Bryan Melillo / Seminar: Rebecca Nison
Prompt: Here is my final project, My Wonderland, which is a fashion design project adapted from ancient Chinese legends. It aims to convey the concept of unreachable fairyland “The three islands”, a distant relationship that makes the beauty mysterious.
At the starting of the semester, I randomly chose religions to focus on from a number of themes, without knowing what I need to do with them. In this bridge project, I chose the local religion Taoism to be my researching point.
There are three sacred islands in Taoism, which were described to be located on the East Sea of China, also known as the three mountains called Penglai, Yingzhou, and Fangzhang. There is an old saying that distance makes beauty. That’s why over thousands of years people dream about the three mountains and produce pieces of art for them. According to my observations, this delicate balance makes people fascinated has a great common with Hedgehog’s dilemma, which linked Chinese and Western philosophy.
