The Lingering Stamp of the Body, or the Reinvention of Samuel Xun

BY LOUIS HO - 24 MAY 2025

That art and fashion are, these days, increasingly enmeshed in a novelty-heavy, spectacle-oriented, social media-driven visual phenomenon is something of a given. Its roots, though, had a decidedly quieter start early in the twentieth century, when artists such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Sonia Delaunay extended their abstract pictorial vocabularies to costumes, textiles and even accessories, kicking off a trajectory of art as apparel. The culturally fecund era of the 1960s and ‘70s saw the Susanna Lewis, Jean Cacicedo and Jae Jarrell, among a host of others, at the head of a full-fledged movement; many of these artists showed at Julie: Artisans’ Gallery in New York, with the space serving as “the premier destination for wearable art for nearly 40 years.”^[1] More recently, the interbreeding between art and fashion have taken on the character of what has been referred to as “critical crossovers.”^[2] Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987) deserves especial mention in this respect. A dress composed entirely of raw steak that channelled “a surrealist tradition, like Meret Oppenheim’s cup lined with fur, or Dali’s Shoe Hat”, it was notoriously recreated by Lady Gaga for her appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2010.^[3]

The shoe, of course, was also worn on the other foot, or, perhaps, head: if artists had few qualms about colonizing the realm of fashion, the reverse proved equally true. Dali’s aforementioned shoe hat was created in collaboration with, and modelled by, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Like Sterbak’s fleshly garment, it made a reappearance in popular culture as a leopard-print version worn by a character in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film, Brazil. In the 1960s, Yves Saint Laurent’s famous Mondrian shift dress was panelled in the bichromatic blocks and thick black lines characteristic of the artist’s paintings, while, more recently, the likes of Hussain Chalayan and Central Saint Martins graduate, Fredrik Tjærandsen, have embraced sartorial innovation – or recognized the utility of shock value, perhaps – in their melding of the wearable and sculptural, sending models down the runway in dissolving garments and inflatable balloon outfits, respectively (with the latter becoming an overnight social media sensation). The Metropolitan Museum’s annual Gala event, seen as one of the biggest nights for the fashion industry, has witnessed designers rise to the occasion. Sarah Jessica Parker, for one, showed up in a Dolce and Gabbana gown with a headpiece featuring the scene of the nativity in 2018, while the Italian house collaborated with Harris Reed to dress model Iman in an ensemble with a feathered cage overskirt and matching head gear in 2021.^[4]

Samuel Xun’s practice, like those of his antecedents in the wearable art movement, is positioned in the space of critical cross currents between the white cube and the runway. Trained in fashion design, his focus has shifted from body-oriented garb to wall-bound object – or, more accurately, a conceptually liminal zone that intersects both. A concern with formal elements of materiality, shape and construction, premised on dressmaking skills, informs his latest body of work. In place of painting, sculpting and modelling, he employs a repertoire that includes pattern-cutting, stitching, ruching, folding, boning, draping, and – a trademark element – embellishment. The pieces in the present exhibition, from interwoven panels to fabric-covered armatures, draw on this fashion-derived language as their basis, the crucial connective tissue between couture and fine art being provided by the medium of textiles, which the artist deploys with an eye to material adaptation, compositional experimentation and visual fantasy. As he notes: “Colour, texture and form are important continuities in my practice. That is especially true at this point, when the world seems to be shifting into the digital realm. The analogue and hand-crafted are vital.”^[5]

The origins of Xun’s interest in form and materiality may be traced, unsurprisingly, to his time in school. He spent several years in LASALLE College of the Arts’ program in fashion design, where, by his own admission, his education was centred on technical aspects of the discipline, such as sketching, sewing and other tools of the trade. It was here, he notes, that he learnt to discover physical form by draping and shaping cloth on a mannequin, a process he refers to as “3D in its purest form”. The post-graduation period saw him relocating to Guangzhou, China, to take up roles with a mid-tier designer and a fast fashion label. He points out that the city is home to a booming textile market, which exposed him to a far larger selection of materials than he was otherwise used to. Picking up the ropes in the trenches – he was churning out 80 designs a month then – he learned to build a rapport with his fabrics, fine-tuning quality and detail. He returned to LASALLE for a degree in 2018, after which he joined a Singapore-based Italian designer who specialized in bespoke attire crafted from vintage Japanese textiles. The turn towards art occurred at this juncture of his career. In 2020, he participated in an exhibition that looked at the aesthetics of camp and kitsch, to which he contributed a work in collaboration with another artist.^[6] That first foray into the visual arts developed into a permanent creative pivot, with Xun remarking that he made the shift “because art was a more experimental medium, that is not tied to the body, sewing or wearability, but allowed me to explore my obsession with surface quality of things.”

Fig. 1. “GGenome” concept sketches and idea board, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 2. Fashion illustration from “Organic Parametrics”, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

The obsession seems to have come full circle. After being involved in several group shows and commissioned projects in the intervening years, which allowed him to develop a visual syntax distinct from his previous practice, the works in the current exhibition evince a renewed interest in matters of the sartorial – in, at least, a technical sense. Titled “Welcome Back, Boo”, the show, his first solo outing as an artist, signals a symbiotic intertwining of his interests in art and couture. Xun observes that, even as a designer, his sensibility verged on the sculptural. An early collection, dating from before, and during, his first stint at LASALLE, demonstrates a precociously sophisticated perspective on the possibilities of apparel. (See fig. 1.) Retrospectively referred to as the “GGenome” collection, these designs represent an attempt to formulate “non-traditional ways of assembling something wearable”; he further characterizes them as “clothing mutating, becoming sculpture or even a hindrance.” The cheeky, almost conceptual approach to form is apparent: tied-up rolls of foam as bodily coverings; external adornments such as artfully draped swathes of fabric; a complete lack of concern for utility, such as the lack of armholes. Here is fashion as fantasy, manipulated objects masquerading as costumes on a body.

That spirit of play pervades the present works. While the need for the pretence of wearability has retreated in the face of ontological about-turns – clothes metamorphosing into objects – the artworks retain, like vestigial limbs, elements of a lingering aesthetic that recall past lives. A piece like I Can Dish It, and I Can Take it is elaborately bedecked with columns of decorative loops, running across the top of the piece and cascading down its length like ruffled frills on a poet blouse; earlier, the pattern had appeared in a design from the “GGenome” era titled Parametrics, a dress that resembles a suit of armour composed of wavy, pleated units. (See fig. 2.) The inclusion of open-ended edges in the collection, from dangling swatches of cloth to ends of ties left loose, has also been translated into works such as I Pick My Battles Carefully, a tessellated panel of shimmery blocks of gold and cherry-red that features hanging lengths and unsecured sides. A series of Weave Study pieces, rather resembling the woven wrap of coconut leaves that the rice cake, ketupat, is traditionally covered in, are likewise fringed by free ends. Their skeins emerge from the dense patterning to hang, suspended, like so many unravelled spools that allude to the reality of frayed hems and unfinished seams.

Fig. 3. Toile adjustments from “The Egg on the Sewing Machine”, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 4. Detail of I’ve Never Felt Guilty About My Pleasures, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 5. A design from “Empty Vessels”, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.

Other details also find their genesis in Xun’s archive. The prevalence of modular construction, for one, is evidenced by pieces like I’m Not Even Going to Dignify That With a Defence and I’ve Never Felt Guilty About My Pleasures, which evokes a collection from 2017, “The Egg on the Sewing Machine”, that looked, in the artist’s words, “a lot more into the psychology of making garments.” Partly inspired by process-based work like Robert Morris’s felt pieces and Yoko Ono’s instructional poems, these user-oriented, interactive outfits were composed of variously shaped segments that were intended to allow the wearer to configure them to individual preference. (See fig. 3.) Tucked away beneath the baroque surface of I’ve Never Felt Guilty, in fact, are lengths of decorative criss-cross lacing, in the manner of a bodice or shoelaces, that were also a feature of the 2019 collection, “Empty Vessels”; the latter is comprised of indigo-hued garments that, conspicuously, feature long, lantern-shaped sleeves. These sleeves, extending beyond the arms to the ground, are held together at the joints by cords laced through eyelets, a utilitarian component that, in the later artwork, has become purely ornamental. (See figs. 4 and 5.)

Fig. 6. “FEMBUOYANT!” concept sketches, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Perhaps, after all, the most basic gesture of archival reinvention that constitutes the present body of work lies in the fundamentals of structure – a fact clearly discerned from a comparison with the “FEMBUOYANT!” collection, which served as Xun’s graduation project in 2020, his last concerted endeavour in fashion before the blandishments of art took over. (See fig. 6.) He notes that, with this group of balloon-like, Koons-esque designs, he began to “experiment with volume, but taking the same compositional logic honed throughout the years, i.e. suggestions of human figures, but simply using geometry to distance itself from traditional garments.” That allusion to the human body is perceptible from the suite of sculptures fabricated from metallised textiles wrapped around shaped wooden panels, including pieces such as You Have Quite a Lot to Unravel, Destruction Comes at a Price, and Maybe You've Never Liked Me All Along. The figural connotations of these works are immediately apparent: the bilateral symmetry of the compositions, vaguely reminiscent of Rorscharch blots, are aligned with the vertical orientation of the human anatomy; the tapered mid-section of several sculptures, including Unravel, recalls the cinched silhouette of the “FEMBUOYANT!” outfit, suggesting the waistline of a model; the interlocking, linear patterns of the works bear marked similarity to the constituent parts of the apparel designs. This particular collection, according to Xun, represented the discovery of a compositional logic that has remained consistent in his visual language, the formal balance and symmetry of which are oriented around the lingering stamp of the body – from sketch to sculpture, garment to object, fashion to art.

^[1] Cassidy George, “In the ’60s, America’s wearable art movement reflected true counterculture”, Document Journal (Jan 21, 2020); see <https://www.documentjournal.com/2020/01/in-the-60s-americas-wearable-art-movement-reflected-true-counterculture/>. Last accessed May 5, 2025. The gallery was opened in 1973 by Julie Schafler Dale, who also authored a pioneering study of the wearable art movement, Art to Wear (1986). Her role as one of the medium’s most tireless promoters is at the heart of the exhibition, “Off the Wall: American Art to Wear”, which ran from 2019 to 2020 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
^[2] See Adam Geczy and Vicki Karraminas’ introduction, “Fashion and Art: Critical Crossovers”, in Geczy and Karraminas (eds), Fashion and Art (London and New York: Berg, 2012), pp. 1–12.
^[3] Ibid, p. 1.
^[4] Institutional interest in fashion has taken off in recent decades, though the Museum of Modern Art, which has maintained an interest in design matters, staged an early exhibition on the sartorial, “Are Clothes Modern?” (1944–45). The Metropolitan Museum’s Yves Saint Laurent show in the early 1980s was a forerunner of the designer-specific retrospective, while the Groninger Museum mounted an exhibition of Azzedine Alaïa’s work in 1997. Other shows organized by major museums include those of Giorgio Armani, Thierry Mugler and Iris van Herpen. In Singapore, the Asian Civilisations Museum has hosted exhibitions of the designs of Guo Pei and Andrew Gn, while the National Museum of Singapore has devoted programming to the cheongsam.
^[5] All quotations from the artist, as well as relevant biographical details, derive from several conversations held with the author in 2025 over video conferencing and through email correspondence.
^[6] “The Foot Beneath the Flower” ran from August to October 2020 at the ADM Gallery in Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media, and was curated by this author. Xun’s work in the show, Bai Barbarella Chow (2020), was a collaboration with Stephanie Burt.

This essay was written in accompaniment of Samuel Xun’s Solo Exhibition, Welcome Back, Boo (2025).