Lemaire Teams With Chinese Artist Lin Yan for Beijing Installation
PARIS — Lemaire has teamed up with Chinese artist Lin Yan for an installation at Beijing’s Dover Street Market outpost.
The “Lin Yan — Lemaire: Beijing Gateway” installation, unveiled July 2, will be in place until Aug. 12 in the store’s elephant space — which features a giant papier mâché sculpture of a pachyderm.
“We love this type of project because it’s the opportunity to ask people to offer their vision of the brand,” said Lemaire codesigner Sarah-Linh Tran in an interview with WWD at the label’s Paris headquarters.
The artist is renowned for creating sculptures and imprints of architectural features from layers of rice paper. “She built a sort of lightweight house around the elephant that respects the colors and textures of the elephant to highlight a selection of silhouettes that are suspended,” Tran explained. She and partner Christophe Lemaire saw parallels between the way Yan shapes paper and the way they think about clothing, as a lightweight home or shelter with multiple layers.
“Lin Yan’s work is very interesting, she has traveled a lot, she studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris,” she said. “She has created a lot of imprints of doors and architectural elements in Beijing when the city was destroying lots of old buildings, so she froze the memory of certain elements.”
The installation features certain of these architectural elements — three doors and windows — in different shades of white and a smoky black that echo one of the key pieces in Lemaire’s fall collection, featuring a marbled print. The artworks are interspersed with five complete looks from Lemaire as well as accessories from the collection for the display.
