Introduction

As a Hong Kong-Canadian fashion designer, I hope to share my vision to the world through fashion and be able to relate people with similar intersectionality. In the collection Pandemonium: Floating Down the Stream of Pandemonium, I will be protesting my frustration and disappointment on Hong Kong - the city where I grew up in.

Pandemonium is a chaotic city where is coined as the center of Hell. To me, this is the perfect metaphor of Hong Kong. The physical and spiritual movement in the city flows like the turbulent stream of Pandemonium. Suffocating landscapes. Endless waves of people. Fluctuant levels of emotions. This unseeable momentum drives the people to the endless end. Unstoppable, continuous, and chaotic. Everyone goes on in their lives every day, as if they know their final destination, yet only less than half a soul knows where they are heading. As floating down this unceasing stream of chaos, the people are hopeless, helpless, and careless, to anything and everything.

Pandemonium: Floating Down the Stream of Pandemonium is a celebration of my heritage. It is a collection to show the world that Hong Kong, in fact, has an immense unique and distinct culture. Through the inspiration of neon light sign culture in Hong Kong, it is explicitly interpreting the sense of Pandemonium I perceived from the city – busy and illusional. As the bridge of the East and West, Hong Kong developed into its own beauty, which is different from the Chinese culture from Mainland China.

Pandemonium: Floating Down the Stream of Pandemonium is also a criticism of my heritage. The materialistic lifestyle that leads everyone to the mist of finding their own identity. The collection is a criticism to the unwillingness of Hongkongers to break through norms. While as the political situation goes, Hongkongers are desperately fighting against each other, simply nobody respects anybody’s individuality. Everyone is terrified to become the black sheep within the community. Within the collection, multiple Cantonese verbal messages were expressed by using signages as decors. From questioning democracy and personal freedom in Hong Kong, to questioning the real purpose of life. While as the collars are built higher and higher, it symbolizes the voices of people are being muted little by little...

Intersection | Cross-Sections Graduate Symposium 2023: Becoming You(th)

Date: 11 March 2023

Location: Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto