Mengyuan Wang王梦媛

Mengyuan Wang is a Textiles designer who has a background in fashion design. During her postgraduate year, she mainly worked across knitting, printing and Shibori.

She likes to intuitively feel the interaction of tools and materials without the intervention of thinking, so that the thinking of the hands is faster than the thinking of the brain. She believes in the product of the subconscious rather than the expression of logic, and allows designs to sprout freely without pruning the branches. The soil and nutrients needed for all these growths come from her background and experience.

Meaningless and repetitive actions or symbols make her calm, and rigorous and complicated crafts bring her freedom. She is keen on the mastery and control of craftsmanship and materials, and gives new interpretations to traditional techniques. She use Shibori as her pen for writing, describing imperfections in a poetic way, and Devore as her knife for carving, appreciating the wholeness gained from loss.

Mengyuan's design originated from a tour at the Medici Villa in Italy. In 1700, a fire destroyed the Chamber of Jupiter's Loves. The flames burned everything that was not allowed to exist. Many years later, The Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani adorned the previously-vacant ceiling frescos with butterflies created by soot and smoke, showing the vanishing moment of the butterfly flock, as if a fire was chasing them out of the room.

With a ruthless flame, burn out the shape of fragile and beautiful butterflies. The contradiction of beauty derived from pain is ornamental. Starting from such contradictions, she has carried out a series of explorations in the field of textiles.

Shibori's binding, pressing, douching, and the softness and unpredictability of the results are like literature, placing the pain into a frame and poetically presenting the traces left by a gorgeous tragedy. And devore is like carving on fabrics. The scars left by chemically burned fibers become transparent after washing in water, the patterns are obtained through subtraction. Through the process, she feels the wholeness gained from loss and regret, which is contradictory but intriguing.

No need to give an explanation, just feel it and allow it.

Waves on the wall

These photos and videos were shot in the room I lived in during the year in London. Traces of my life left here, and most of my emotions when I get along with myself are irradiated and cast shadows in the whole space, sometimes it is the cool swimming pool in summer, and sometimes it is the deep sea submerged above my head.

Making process

Overlapping knitting

Devore is a chemical fire for fabric. I combined this printing technique with knitting to explore the possibility of double-sided knitting with different patterns. The method of overlapping patterns broadens the boundaries of knitting and gives more possibilities to traditional knitting.