Kaiwen Shi: a trip in the real world fantasy

“I just want to use fantasy to get at reality.”

Her thesis collection, A trip in the real world fantasy, interprets a short manga-inspired series of graphic vignettes she drew about her childhood. Most of the stories take a real memory as the point of departure but twist into the surreal through nightmarish added details, modified plots, and substituted characters. “I don’t want to create a sweet fantasy story,” she insists, attributing that ambition to Henry Darger, whose artwork depicted young girls in wonderland-like scenes interrupted with violence and catastrophe. “He’s a big reference in my collection,” she says. “Darger himself had a very sad childhood, so he put this darkness into the sweetness.” Rejecting the Disneyfied trope of using cartoons to lighten bleak story elements like Darger did, she wants to express the bleakness she remembers feeling about seemingly-innocuous childhood memories. It’s a way of telling the truth emotionally, not literally. “I just want to use fantasy to get at reality.”

One of her comics recalls the time she went for tea with an aunt who, upon discovering someone making off with her handbag, “kicked off her high heels” and ran to apprehend the thief herself. In Shi’s comic, fury has twisted the aunt’s eyes into spirals. Her feet, splayed out mid-run, are clad only in socks, her shucked-off shoes flying into neighbouring panels. But what really captures the eye is the aunt’s marvellous coat, both striped and floral-printed, its black edges jagged in her frenzied rage. Shi developed this image into the first look of her collection, a lushly-textured trompe l’oeil trench coat.

In another vignette, Shi herself gets to play the role of thief. The story begins with an early memory of a primary school teacher seizing her two favourite toys, which she wasn’t allowed to have brought to class. She never got them back. But in this version of the story, she takes matters into her own hands, breaking into school on a rescue mission to retrieve them dressed up as a robber: “I wear an old sweater as a mask, put on a crayon bullet belt, and bring a carrot bomb.” It’s a symbolic get-up – crayons represent the power of drawing, and she despises carrots. Beneath the ammunition, the robber wears a plaid dress, inspiring a dress in the collection made of ribbon-like black and white strips of fabric sewn in grid formation on sheer tulle. Accessorized, obviously, with a black beaded harness which can hold crayons like artillery shells.

It was difficult to translate her drawings into conventional toiles because calico couldn’t represent the high-contrast aesthetic of her drawings. So Shi printed out her favourite drawings at human scale and fit those to the model. “They’re all black-and-white, so that helped me to find the irregular silhouettes,” she says. Moments of asymmetry really interested her, as they imply a perspectival distortion or an exaggeration of the hand. She selected the key looks through this process, only then fabricating toiles. It quickly became clear that her materiality would have to provide most of the hand-drawn quality she wanted.

“It’s very tiring for your hands. I need to have a rest after every piece.”

She found that quality in tufting, a technique more typical of interior design than fashion design. To tuft a garment, she draws out each pattern piece on a base fabric, marking out which areas should be which colour, and stretches it around a wooden frame as if preparing a canvas for painting. Then she uses a tufting gun to shoot loops of yarn through the surface of the fabric. Over time the loops accumulate into a dense furry texture. “It’s very tiring for your hands. I need to have a rest after every piece.” After all the pattern pieces are complete, she can cut them out from the base fabric and fashion the garment together.

In addition to tufting, beadwork was instrumental in translating the drawings to garments.  “Beading is like drawing because each bead is like a small pixel, and you connect them together,” she explains. “You’re bringing the 2D world to real life.” Indeed, her beadwork blooms like flowers and crusts like undersea coral onto the garment’s surfaces. She also transformed beads into pastel-hued, looping chainmail that supports itself without the need for an under-layer.

Through these tufted and beaded fabrications, not to mention crocheted and handwoven details, Shi succeeded at translating the lines of her drawings into the final garments. It was a painstaking endeavour. After losing the assistance of her interns because of the pandemic, each look took her between one and two months to complete. She returned to her family home in China and conscripted her family into some free labour, she says, but it took a lot of personal effort nonetheless.

After finishing this collection, she plans to develop a series of accessories based on the fabrication techniques she’s developed, turning some of them into prints to save time. Will the carrot bomb handbag make it to market? Only Shi can say.