"Comrade Couture" Post-screening Talk: Experimentation, Self-Expression, and Rebellion Through Fashion and Art 

DATE & TIME:

Screening : 17:45 - 19:10 / 26 NOV 

Film duration : 82 minutes

Post-screening Talk: 19:15 - 20:15

LANGUAGE:

Post Screening Talk will be conducted in English
 

SPEAKER:

Kary Kwok (Artist/Art Director)

Sonia Wong (Artist/Writer/Researcher)

Shirley Lau (Brand Director of iisuArt)

INTRODUCTION:

Join us for a fun post-screening talk of the film “Comrade Couture” with the artists to learn about their creative process, experimentation, self-expression, and rebellion through fashion and art.

“Comrade Couture” is a journey into the wild nether world of the fashionistas and Bohemians of East Berlin. It was a fantasy world within East Germany’s very restricted everyday life. Here you could break ranks, be individual and provocative. The most important identifying feature of the scene was the development of a personal style, because you couldn’t buy such a thing in GDR times. In this nether world, you had to create your individual image. This film tells of the longing, passions and dreams which were tested, experienced and lived out in the shadow of the Wall. Director Marco Wilms, who was himself a model at the GDR’s fashion institute at the time, sets out to once more resurrect this life’s unique lifestyle, economic freedom, and longing to be different, in the here and now. He finds the heroes of his youth in East Berlin: designer Sabine von Oettingen, photographer Robert Paris, and stylist and hairdresser Frank Schäfer, and explores with them their shining nether world lives. Two decades later, the members and friends of the legendary East Berlin avantgarde fashion theatres “Chic, Charmant und Dauerhaft” (Chic, Charming and Enduring) and “Allerleirauh” (All-Kinds-of-Fur) meet again at a »subversive« Eastern Bloc Party, initiated by director Marco Wilms.

About the Speakers

Kary Kwok is an artist/ art director based in Hong Kong, working in photography, theatre, performance art, fashion, advertising, and design. Since graduating with an MA in photography from the Royal College of Art in London, UK in 1999, he has worked as the fashion editor for Amoeba Magazine, the chief editor for Razor Red Magazine, and on image design for several organisations, including the Hong Kong Art Festival, New Vision Festival, Zuni Icosahedron, Performance Workshop Taiwan and Edward Lam Theater Company. He has taught at HKUST, HKU Space, and Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, among others and he teaches at HKDI for the University of Creative Art London. Kwok’s photographs are the subject of 109 men, 69 women, and 10 in-between (1999). Kwok has exhibited in the UK, US, Europe, Taipei and Hong Kong. A collector of rare fashion catalogues, books, and magazines, Kwok had his collection — which spans over four decades — shown at the 21 -2023 edition of Booked in Tai Kwun and Joyce Boutique, Art exhibition at JC contemporary, Art Central and Square Street gallery 2023.

Sonia Wongis an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher based in Hong Kong. Her work explores sexuality, identity, intimacy, and violence, within the context of Asian histories and colonial legacies. 

Sonia works primarily with text, presented through publications, installations, and live performances. Given the artist’s extensive involvement and exposure in different fields, Sonia’s works are border-crossing, often intertwining the personal and the political, the emotional and the intellectual. Her voice is one that is highly intimate and distinctively feminine, as she consciously draws from her lived experiences and personal texts.

Her recent projects focus on exploring femininity, relationship, connection, desire, vulnerability, intimacy, and trauma, through a combination of performed text, installation, and immersive visuals and ambient soundscapes. She debuted at Tai Kwun with "Becoming The Wild Thing” (2022) at the opening of “Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III” Exhibition (2022) with collaborator Zoë Marden, with two reruns of the performance in March and April 2023, and a solo performance “Delivered Not Read” presented by Eaton HK in February 2023.