In summer 2011, art and fashion meet at the Musee national des beaux-arts du Quebec through works by the designer Ying Gao. The exhibition Ying Gao: Art, Fashion and Technology presents a dozen pieces that include three series of interactive garments which move and change in response to noise, sound, motion or light.
These garments represent state-of-the-art research on textiles with integrated technologies but still have an amazingly poetic dimension. They draw the viewer's eye, inflating, unfolding, transforming while protecting the virtual body they cover. A couture experience like no other.
For Gao, apparel art serves as a means to investigate the various ways people relate to their environment as well as contemporary complex social and technological issues. Ying Gao is a fashion designer and professor of design at UQAM. She is also the recipient of the 2009 Phyllis-Lambert Design Montreal Grant, awarded annually by Ville de Montreal. Her creations have been exhibited in North American, European and Asian museums and featured in books and magazines devoted to art and design (D+A,Wallpaper, Interview Magazine, Vision, etc.).
