Lei

Lei is a fashion textile artist who specialised in creating fashion costumes using mixed media forms of printed textiles. Her work focus on creating narratives that are challenging gender norms and celebrating human identity. Lei graduated from London College of Fashion with a First-Class Honours degree in BA (Hons) Fashion Textiles: Print, where she started exploring the boundary between performance costume and contemporary fashion. During her study at RCA, Lei has explored her identities through various forms of creation-- from traditional ways of textile printing and illustrating to digitally modelling, and creating moving images.

Eternity, Romance and Revolution, represent Lei’s ideal way of human existence. To have everlasting life and regeneration ability like a jellyfish, to have the most romantic life form of a whale, and to have the revolutionary pursuit of evolution and metamorphosis. Lei's works are always about human-being and she's keen on creating an ever-lasting piece as an elixir of life.

Awards: Fenix Group Overall Best Fashion Film Grand Award, ISFFC 2021

Exhibitions: Fashionclash Festival, 2021

New Designers, 2020

Premiere Vision, 2020

'Manga: Colour and Style', the British Museum, 2019

Human civilization was born in the ocean. Science research shows that all lives including human were originated from the ocean. The future of human being would be closely related to the ocean as well.

No-Land is a hypothetical underwater scenario in a parallel universe, sets at the situation of the disappearance of land.

Many forecasts show that in 2050, the rising seas will erase a large number of coastal cities. In 2223, the whole delta region and other coastal cities around the world begin to build No-Land, the underwater residential areas illustrate the combination of the future vision of the underwater world and evolved human civilization, where the human body in No –Land are under the premise when genetic modifications of human to have other animal’s physics become common.

Lei is designing characters in her experimental way of both physical and digital forms, towards a fashion performance film illustrates the combination of the future vision of a underwater world and evolved human civilization.

In the year 2223, the evolved humans are starting to build ‘No-Land’, a hypothetical underwater residential area in a parallel universe, set in the situation of the disappearance of land. Lei invites the viewer to enter this fantastical world and meet three underwater citizens. Licht (appear as Lux in its virtual form) as your neighbour, Lacey as a landlord and collector, and Lachesis who runs a delivery service. The fashion performance film illustrates characters and their surroundings through the use of colours, materials, the form of their bodies, and methods of filming. Lei depicts the scenario using mixed techniques including digital experiments from character modelling to digital fashion creation, and physical making processes from fish leather tanning to analogue photography, to celebrate the malleability of future human identities.

Directed, animated, edited by Lei

Lacey performed by Annie Zhao

Filmed by Lei and Yuke Liu

Special Thanks to Ziyi Wang

Medium:

Video

Size:

00:03:09

-1008 Sunlight Zone - Licht / Lux, Digital

The physical form of Licht doesn't go out of the building often so the viewer meets Lux in the located virtual space of room -1008 in the Sunlight Zone. Licht decided to move to No.19 because of its affordable rent and large living space, while the rents on land are skyrocketing since the reduction of land area.

Special Thanks to Heng

Medium:

Digital

3D Modeling Avatars Digital Identity Digital Material Digital Worlds Metaverse Science fiction

-1802 Twilight Zone - Lacey, Mixed Media

Evening Lacey: Fish leather jacket with long pleats, Pleated trousers and bodysuit.

Fish skin shadow play puppets.

Detachable headpieces.

Experiments with different filming processes.

Lacey is the second character that appears in its full body in the film <No-Land: Life in 2223> who owns a huge amount of apartments in the building. In the film, Lacey initiatively invites the viewer to its real room for a rent collection. Lacey is one of the first groups of people who entered No-Land and lived in -1802 in the Twilight Zone surrounded by cold-water coral reefs, which the home to more fish and other marine animals than the rest of the ocean combined, making Lacey having more advanced modification on the body, including colour-changing system from head to toes. Lacey’s look appears with a fish skin shadow play puppet in response to the Chinese shadow play puppetry, and cross-dressing theatre plays in East Asia.

Performed by Annie Zhao

Special Thanks to Ciment Pleating and Xin Zhou

Medium:

Mixed Media

Costume Cultural Identity dance Fashion Humanwear Performance Printed Textiles puppetry Theatre

Lachesis in motion.

Colour changing.

The interaction of vision between the viewer and Lachesis.

Lachesis lives in -201 in the sunlight zone. It always covers its body because its job of delivery service requires a long distance of journey in a short time, therefore no one knows what it looks like. Lachesis goes on land and also beyond the Twilight zone for special delivery.

Special Thanks to SW Darkroom