MUYAO ZHANG

DELETE // 2015 // Bachelorarbeit Modedesign

It has been over thirty years since she left him. His figure turned from a five-years old little boy into a shadow. She wondered if she’d recognize him if there would be the day she saw him as a man on the street. Would she? And what would it be based on? Through the background that she gave him or the life story she would have heard about him? By imaging and recognizing the way he would dress himself or by feeling the sense of love? – The love to the one that she doesn’t know. What would clothing tell us about a man we don’t know? How would we imagine what kind of clothes the man we knew would be wearing? If the backgrounds of clothing could still reflect the story of a man, would incomplete details project one’s blurred identity? If the shape of a garment could still define a character for the one has been wearing it, would proper attitudes be reproduced by deliberately styled images?
The collection is inspired by a true story of my mother, a deleted part of her past related to her son, whom she never met again since 1982. It is the year that I ‘ve just turned the age of hers as she gave birth to him, while he’s just become as old as she was when I was born. It is not a story I could tell by starting with “The last time I saw” or “The last thing I remember”, it is not a memoir made up by sticking broken pieces together – there are no pieces I could touch and there are no memories I could remember. Because I’ve never met him, because I’ m afraid I might never find him on the street through the crowd in modern China.