Chanel’s Mobile Art Pavillon in Hong Kong
Last week in Hong Kong, French fashion house Chanel officially launched its latest global power project, the ambitious Mobile Art Pavillon. Commissioned by Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld, the futuristic mobile art gallery was designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid.
Created from fiberglass panels, the 700-square-meter multi-million dollar pavilion took six months to build and will be dismantled seven times to travel the world. For now its home will be Hong Kong’s Star Ferry Car Park before it is packed into 65 containers and shipped to six more cities, ending its tour in Paris in 2010.
“The cost is not important. Chanel is about the dream,” says Bruno Pavlovsky, director of Chanel’s fashion division. “The project is more about building the Chanel image and what you see today is consistent with our vision for the next 10 years.” The 20 commissioned artists had free reign to use any creative medium but all works had to be strictly inspired by the 2.55 quilted handbag designed by Coco Chanel in 1955.
Chanel’s contemporary artists include Yoko Ono, Sophie Calle, Stephen Shaw, Sylvie Fleury , Wim Delvoye and Fabrice Hyber. Mobile Art curator and the editor-in-chief of the magazine Beaux-Arts Fabrice Bousteau says the initial list was “artists that I like - that’s what a curator does. And all said yes, so we now have an exhibition with work by artists who have a strong personality and voice in their work.”
The most controversial submission is Wim Delvoye’s pigskin 2.55 bags (actually made in the Chanel workshop see pictures in photo gallery below) and two stuffed tattooed pigs, named Jamie and Slobodan.
“We decided not to reject any project,” Pavlovsky says. “Chanel herself was controversial, so to have pieces that evoke controversy is okay.”
After the French artist Sophie Calle had accepted Chanel’s commission, a work conflict led her to advertise in a Japanese magazine seeking an artist to carry out her project. Her vision was to stop passers-by, tell them to empty their bags and offer to buy both contents and the bag they were carrying. Soju Tao won the job with a bag budget of EUR11,000 ($17,794). Tao convinced several Chanel-toting strangers to hand over their bags with one 2.55 in the exhibition containing cash, house keys, a camera, mobile phone, an address book and Shirley MacLaine’s book Out On A Limb.
Kellie Hush March 6, 2008 via life & Style
Kellie Hush was invited by Chanel to cover the inaugural Hong Kong Exhibition
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More about the story : “Chanel ” Ufo” Exhibits lands in Hong Kong, ” Herald Tribune
Click for a rendering of the project by the New York Times
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