Most of Earth’s creatures enter and leave the world in the same way: naked and covered in blood. So the choice of Abattoir 1933—a sprawling, bunker-like concrete slaughterhouse-cum-contemporary art space in Shanghai—was the ideal place to present a début collection from a designer fixated on the metamorphosis of the useless into the precious.
Mr. Sun Yun—a celebrated interior architect in his native China—presented a collection articulated around the concept of rebirth, which, as he specifies in our exclusive interview, “is not renewal.” Indeed, according to Mr. Yun: “(rebirth implies) a completely different understanding of the world and a different attitude to life. For example, a tall chimney in an abandoned power station in the city, it could be a problem for the city, but examined from another perspective, maybe it could have a new life as the city’s thermometer.” Mr. Yun’s collection is called CORNERSTONE. In early architecture, the cornerstone had a ceremonial importance and was often inscribed with the values and prayers of the culture. Mr. Yun’s collection is a refined meditation on contemporary style—one that elegantly ruminates on the designer’s aesthetic preoccupations: luxury and waste, utility and ornament, decay and regeneration.
Mr Sun’s full interview will be published in Dapper Dan magazine 16, coming out in October