Ni Haifeng @ Arrow Factory

Vive la Différence is an installation created by artist Ni Haifeng that presents issues of production, consumption and commodification within the context of a shop window design at the Arrow Factory. Using shreds of fabric that have been discarded after commercial factory production, the artist has collaborated with two different design teams to produce a pair of unique “high-end” fashion garments that will be presented in Arrow Factory’s space in the form of a luxury store window display. The two garments share the same origin—a dress designed by French luxury brand Hermès—and the same materials (a box of fabric shreds) but the social context and process of production is entirely different. Ni has chosen to work with two workers with incongruent backgrounds—one is a Chinese run “mom and pop” tailor shop Bieju Yige located in the hutong adjacent to Arrow Factory that subsists on tailoring, mending and patching clothes for the neighborhood residents, and the other is Beijing based French-Australian designers Aurelien Lecour and Tony Saint Hua, creators of Le Divan Studio who work in the creative sector of fashion industry. Each has been enlisted to reinterpret and reproduce their own dress based on an image of the unique “original” design, with the outcome intended not only to yield two different aesthetic responses, but to also acknowledge the social discrepancy between these two diverse yet parallel forms of labor. By purposefully choosing collaborators with dramatically different economic backgrounds and handing the creative act of making over to others, Ni engages with a social process of making where the means of production are questioned and clear notions of authorship are disrupted. Vive la Différence seeks to expose both the visual dissonance between the extremely lavish and the mundane everyday and the hidden social frictions of production and presentation within the humble surroundings of the hutong. Vive la Différence or “Long Live the Difference” mockingly reiterates the irrevocable differences between the “low” and the “high”, between the unwanted and the “highly desirable”, between grim reality and utopian promises of a pan-consumerist society.

Ni Haifeng’s (b.1964, Zhoushan) practice stems from an interest in cultural systems of return, exchange, language and production. Born and raised in China but currently a resident of the Netherlands, Ni employs photography, video and installations to explore the simultaneous creation and obliteration of meaning while drawing attention to the cyclical movements of people, products and goods that are often reflective of patterns of colonialism and globalization. His aims to subvert the status quo and counteract preconceived notions of art are, in his own words, an effort towards reaching a “zero degree of meaning”. Ni’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions locally and internationally. He lives between Amsterdam and Beijing.

The artist and Arrow Factory would like to thank the generous assistance of Le Divan Studio and Bieju Yige for their collaboration.