As an artist, his or her personal background and social environment play an important role in the creation. Lu Biaobiao team from Guangzhou as well as Swedish artist Linnéa Sj?berg re-interpret elements in fashion from perspectives of function, art, society, morality and politics.
Nowadays, the focus of more and more artists’ creation is no longer just the final work but also the process to show their ways of thinking and development of their artworks, sometimes its development even beyond the artists’ expectation, to reach the final judgements. Lu Biaobiao team (which composed by Artists Lu Biaobiao, Wang Hua, He Jidan and Wang Ying, and all of whom are professional teachers of clothing design in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts) from the Pearl River Delta Region of China which is an important production base for global apparel products and all related materials makes deep understanding of value carrier of fashion industry. They use the “useful” and the “useless” to make artworks. The “useless” in the well-defined fashion industry -- grey fabric pieces, clothing trademark, sewing thread, oddments in factory, canvas, underwear, outdoor products, embroidery, leather, wool materials, plastic bags, packaging materials and zipper accessories to make 12 business suits. It is the defined “useless” used to create artworks that re-examined the value and categories between the word “useful” and “useless”. Through complicated process, it even exceeds the value of the “useful”. Why choosing to make suits? As artist stated, first of all, a suit presents the most complicated technological requirements and procedures, which just provides a carrier for the “useless” to reflect new values in the form of unconventional expression. Secondly, 12 typical plants/ flowers represented by 12 months are presented as the theme of suit which implies the subtle game between male power and female power as well as the double meaning of original value and residual value which is namely the deep thinking on the “useful" and the “useless”. In a sense, this is another attempt at sustainability in a fast-moving fashion consumer industry.

The difference is that Swedish artist Linnéa work “Business Woman_GTD4s810” adopts a new way of expression. It looks more like a document type of record display. Before she began to play this “Business Woman”, vacuum packing keeps her old clothes well. Then gradually into the role of “Business Woman”, she forged the interview and photographs to the final end of the project. The artist cut up clothes and bag into pieces to weave a tapestry. At the beginning, Linnéa described her previous work before GTD4s810: “I stand in front of the mirror in the morning and with extreme detail I shape my identity with different accessories and clothing. I feel strong and love to be seen, I am an exhibitionist by nature. But as soon as I enter my studio, everything falls apart, my own art practice stands still”. After that, the artist became obsessed with changing her appearance and longed to be someone else. It looks like a performance. She disguised her punk look with sunglasses, silk scarf, a pair of pearl earrings and by wearing a blouse and pencil skirt as well as short blonde hair. Over the next year and a half, she “became” the “Business Woman” 24 hours a day. She posted images on social media that showed to people: “there is a defined power between today’s images and thoughts to dissolve boundaries” . “Business Woman” is kind of an empty promise and “her identity” has only a flat appearance which is an extremely personal but not really her “personal” work. Her fashion appearance is a kind of “intermediary” existence. It exists in the interpretation of others. After a year and a half, she felt physically and mentally exhausted after playing the role in every move. The fatigue caused by the illusion of pursuing the definition of “professional women” in the consumer society finally overwhelmed her. As a result, she stopped the work with a lot of activism. It is interestingly to note that these two (groups of) artists used fashion symbols in the current cultural and social landscape to play a “game”. That means socalled the “useful”, the “useless” as well as the professional women’s dressing marks, etc., to let the audiences see these empty metaphors in the manipulation of the price system of consumer society, however, as the value of the entity is stripping. Thus, it criticizes the obsession of images of things by the public in today’s consumerism society.

1 In the work “Business Woman_GTD4s810”, GTD4s are abbreviation for “Getting Things Done for Satan”.
2 Conversation with Annee Olofsson, September 7th, 2016, in Stockhlom
3 Fredrik Ehlin, 2012. The original text: how images and ideas today have such defining powers that they are mixed with and dissolve the boundaries bordering existence.