Reflections on ‘Guo Pei: Fashioning Imagination’

Since Guo Pei stepped into the dizzying world of high fashion with her debut Samsara collection in 2006, the Beijing-born designer has made a name for herself as China’s foremost couturier. Her opulent garments meld an array of global influences, from imperial Chinese robes and European court fashion to Eastern mythologies and botanical motifs. Guo Pei: Fashioning Imagination is the first major museum exhibition of the couturier’s work in East Asia, and is notable for presenting her fashion in dialogue with contemporary art and design for the first time. The exhibition takes viewers on a journey through Guo’s dazzling couture collections, highlighting her distinctly postmodern remixing of disparate cultural references and making broader visual and thematic connections with artworks and design objects from the M+ collections.

As the exhibition’s curator, my first step was to review the 16 collections Guo produced from 2006 to 2021. Approaching these collections, I felt like a botanist examining flora. I was devising a taxonomy of Guo’s garments, identifying different themes and recurring typologies.

Floral motifs are prominent in Guo’s work, and the idea of a garden inspired us from the outset. Putting together the exhibition was like designing a garden, both in terms of my curatorial approach and the spatial experience for the viewer. Rather than adopting a chronological approach to the material, I picked different elements and placed them alongside each other as if planting thematic ‘species’ for viewers to enjoy. The exhibition is consequently laid out like a topographic map, with the viewer encountering a variety of motifs as they traverse the winding paths.

A designer of our times

The decision to present Guo’s couture in parallel with contemporary art and design came naturally. What makes this show quintessentially M+ is a perspective that situates Guo’s practice within Asia’s contemporary visual culture more broadly. I’m not a fashion historian; I’m a curator of architecture and design, so I see beyond the realm of fashion and take Guo’s garments as art objects.

Guo is also an undeniably contemporary figure. Unlike previous exhibitions, which often emphasised her Chinese heritage and juxtaposed her couture with Chinese antiquities, Fashioning Imagination considers Guo as a designer with a singular, contemporary vision, notwithstanding her utilisation of traditional craft techniques and mythologies. When we approached her while planning this exhibition, she herself asked not to have her works be isolated to fashion but rather to engage with the M+ collections.

Blossoming creativity

The exhibition opens with the section titled ‘The Joy of Life’, featuring Guo’s haute couture collections Garden of Soul (2015) and An Amazing Journey in a Childhood Dream (2007). These two collections combine intricate botanical motifs that allude to the power of nature with a sense of playfulness and childlike wonder, showcasing the richness of Guo’s imagination.

It is important to note that in Guo’s youth, everyone wore grey Mao suits. There were no pink skirts or glossy fashion magazines. Garment production was limited to functional pieces, and traditional craft techniques once used to create opulent clothing were suppressed. All Guo had were the stories of China’s beautiful costume traditions that her grandmother told her about. As a result, when Guo started to work as a fashion designer, she had to draw heavily from her own imagination to supplement the limited historical references available. It took time and effort to locate artisans with the requisite expertise who could ply their trades once more and pass on their knowledge to the next generation. So in this section, I wanted to show how Guo’s couture is like the coming of spring after a long winter—there’s this blossoming of imagination and a revitalisation of long lost craft traditions.

I paired Guo Pei’s early couture dresses with West Looks East (2013) by Aisha Khalid, an artist who is similarly lauded for her contemporary applications of ancient artistic techniques. Khalid, who was trained in Indo-Persian miniature painting, utilises the tradition’s intricate brushwork to render tulips in her interrogation of complex cross-cultural relationships throughout history.

Meanwhile, Guo’s 2007 collection, An Amazing Journey in a Childhood Dream, was conceived when she was pregnant with her second child. The garments in this collection are overtly feminine, with pastel palettes. This is contrasted by the silver embroidery, which references the costumes of Spanish bullfighters and injects a sense of vigour and strength. Guo’s designs might seem pretty and ‘sweet’, but they are also a kind of armour; they project the image of a strong and powerful woman. I found a parallel between Guo Pei and the subject of Liu Ye’s The Little Match-Seller (2004), an oil painting inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Match Girl (1845). The Beijing-based painter is known for his ‘cute’, cartoon-like portraits of girls, yet The Little Match-Seller also conveys a powerful sense of the protagonist’s resilience and hope—traits that define Guo Pei herself.

Eastern aesthetics

In ‘New Tales of the East’, we see Guo Pei deconstructing and refashioning iconic motifs associated with the East. Inspired by the Middle Eastern compendium of tales, One Thousand and One Nights, Guo produced a collection called 1002 Nights (2009) in which she reinterprets royal gowns from across the East. A standout is The Qinghua-Porcelain, a gown and headdress that nods to the lasting cultural impact of blue and white China vases from the Ming and Qing dynasties. Another special exhibit from this collection is The Yellow Queen, better known as Rihanna’s 2015 Met Gala dress. Inspired by imperial court dress, this dramatic gown with a long train has a bright yellow hue associated with Chinese royalty.

The section also includes pieces from Guo’s East Palace (2019) collection, which incorporates various symbols of imperial status. The lustrous dresses are made with mother of pearl, traditionally used as an inlay material for expensive lacquerware. For these dresses, Guo collaborated with a Kyoto textile design firm called Tamiya Raden to produce a gorgeous silk woven with thin strips of mother of pearl, giving the fabric a nacreous sheen. One gown features high, angular shoulders—a nod to the clothing of Khalkha Mongolian noblewomen—along with embroidered dragons symbolising the emperor’s power.

The architecture of the body

‘Transcending Space’ explores Guo’s fascination with architecture, which was sparked by her first trip to Europe in the late 1990s. Encountering Gothic churches and Baroque mansions for the first time, she was drawn to the power of ornamentation—the details that adorn places with ceremonial or spiritual significance, where people are brought together. The desire to ornament spaces is found in European churches as much as in the palaces and temples of the East. At the same time, architecture performs a practical function, sheltering people from the wind and the rain. For Guo, clothing is an architecture of the body—it adorns the body, it may serve ceremonial functions, and it protects us from the elements.

Inspired by the frescoes and interiors of the St. Gallen Cathedral in Switzerland, Guo’s Legends (2017) collection examines European religious imagery and lavish regalia. One design features a structural bell-shaped headpiece and skirt embellished with opals and crystals, echoing the cathedral’s Baroque construction. The bejewelled cross that crowns the piece is another nod to the religious site.

Guo takes her interest in structural pieces further with the L’Architecture (2018) collection, which features a series of black dresses that resemble human-sized buildings. These dresses are juxtaposed with Wilson Shieh Ka-ho’s paintings of anthropomorphised Hong Kong landmarks, including the HSBC headquarters, City Hall and International Finance Centre.

Mythical worlds

‘Ethereal Mythologies’ delves into the wondrous creatures and realms that appear in Guo’s work. The symbol of the dragon is important to Chinese culture and it reappears a lot in Guo’s couture. Dragons are able to move through worlds, joining the human and the divine, and are a dynamic symbol of transformation for Guo. In the collection Legend of the Dragon (2012), the mythological creature adorns everything from mini dresses to evening gowns. It is as if they represent the different costumes of a superhero-like character.

The Elysium (2018) collection is somewhat similar to Garden of Soul in that it deals with cycles of blossoming and decay. Guo created Elysium after her mother’s death, so it’s a collection that explores mortality and visions of the afterlife. One of my favourite exhibits is a gold ballgown with a bamboo crinoline made in collaboration with master bamboo basketweavers. Flowers and twigs made of gold foil sprout from this crinoline skirt to form an ethereal landscape. This is placed on a turntable to evoke the unceasing cyclicality of time. The dress is placed in dialogue with Lang Jingshan’s Majestic Solitude (1933), which appears to depict a tree in the misty landscape of Huangshan. In fact, this manipulated image is a composite of several negatives. It presents an imagined landscape, much like Guo’s couture interpretation of Elysium.

Sands of time

The final section, ‘On Dreams and Reality’, focuses on Guo’s longstanding exploration of time and regeneration. Samsara (2006), her debut haute couture collection, takes as its departure point the titular Sanskrit term connoting cycles of death and rebirth. The centrepiece of this collection is The Magnificent Gold, which features a wide, dome-shaped skirt reminiscent of a lotus flower—a Buddhist symbol of purity. The gold-embroidered motifs that radiate outwards on the skirt took more than 50,000 hours to create. The Samsara collection is paired with Encounter (2016), an eclectic array of pieces with contrasting style elements and innovative fabrics. In these dresses, past and future collide in a dreamlike way. These colourful dresses are complemented by Irene Chou’s Untitled (1990) ink painting, composed of dynamic strokes of black with bursts of green, yellow and purple. Another productive dialogue emerges between Guo’s works and Hon Chi-fun’s Chasm Forever (1971), a large-scale painting of a blue circle with a flesh-like cleft in the middle that at once evokes the bodily and the cosmic.

A visionary Chinese couturier

It is remarkable that Guo was able to produce ten collections for Paris Fashion Week between 2016 and 2021, even more so when you consider the time and artistry that went into developing the materials and constructing the final pieces. In a still West-centric haute couture industry, she has been fearless in asserting her Chinese heritage in a maximalist way, while also remixing Chinese motifs with wide-ranging global influences. She presents a vision of ‘Chinese-ness’ that is utterly contemporary and enthralling in its rich storytelling. Perhaps in 100 years, Guo’s garments will still be interesting art objects because of the story they tell about the culture of our time.

Reviewing Guo’s collections, I found a consistency in her practice, a singular vision that has lasted throughout the decades since she started her career in fashion. Guo’s work defies trends. She creates her own world.

—As told to Ophelia Lai