NEW YORK
RUE FRANÇAISE by Miss China
Concept Store
January 9 - February 14, 2010
Concept Store by Miss China with Arlette Lacour (A La cour), Gabrielle Soyer (Lindell & Co), Stephanie Bouvier, Jean-Philippe Delhomme, Marianne Daquet and Elisa Cousseran, Taher Chemirik, Aymeric Ebrard, Adriana Garcia Galan, Jean Michel Pancin, Miss China and Tia Calli Borlase and Isadora Chen and YLWT.
« Rue Française» is an event designed by Miss China for the Christmas period at the ZÜRCHER STUDIO, New York. Creative people confront works of art and other products in a gallery that turns into a “concept store” – a transient showcase for a French art of living.
Bonnie Tchien Hy (alias Miss China) knows something about the subject. French by adoption, her choices are all the more relevant in that they express a certain “French touch” through the presentation of unique pieces, multiples and distinct objects, using a wide diversity of media.
A la Cour (“At the Court”) is Arlette Lacour’s collection of objects in limited editions that evoke the Grand Siècle, with Marie-Antoinette and a hero of the American struggle for independence, the Marquis de Lafayette. This was a period when codes of elegance and refinement touched their zenith.
Lindell & Co. produce textiles based on original designs by Gabrielle Soyer, who combines Scandinavian sensibility with a knowledge of Oriental textiles and ancestral embroidery from the autonomous Indian province of Kashmir.
Stéphanie Bouvier has created a curious ceramic forest of Christmas trees, 15 cm high, whose branches are hung with small paper bags. This is a reference to French luxury brands – or perhaps fine pastry.
Jean-Philippe Delhomme
The author of The Cultivated Life, published by Rizzoli in 2009, with around a hundred drawings, is a painter par excellence of modern life, which he chronicles with inimitable humour in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, GQ USA, GQ France and Grazia Casa. Drawing on the trials and tribulations of the contemporary lifestyle – the design addict cautiously prowling around the latest piece of modern furniture in an upscale boutique, or the poseur looking for the perfect outfit to convey his literary gravitas – Delhomme’s brushwork is as impressionistic as his wit is sharp.
Marianne Daquet and Elisa Cousseran are living in Beijing and create chocolate bars engraved with the most evocative titles of French litterature and their Chinese translation, so that one can munch on “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu” among others. Their Words to Read, Words to Taste is a cocoa-artistic project, in collaboration with Eric Girerd, master chocolatier. “Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is everything to me”, Marianne Daquet has said. “The title alone can contain love and death and life, and all the world’s emotions. By eating chocolate, it’s like you’re eating those emotions and making them your own. It’s like a magic spell.”
Taher Chemirik is a designer, interior designer and master jeweller. Each of his pieces is a unique encounter. Characterised by the clarity and purity of minimal lines, and formal, sculptural density, his jewellery expresses the sanctified ritual of regalia.
He has recently created collections for Christofle, Roger Vivier, Loewe and Bernardaud. And he has contributed works to the collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. He is represented by Harvey Nichols in London and by Barneys, Sachs et Jeffries in the United States.
Aymeric Ebrard
His Impression, soleil levant (Mobile) (“Impression, rising sun (Mobile)”) – a reference to Monet’s famous painting dating from 1873, the year of the first global economic crisis – is a golden ball with quivering spangles. Suspended by a white rope like a carousel pompom, and hovering over the room, it turns space into a landscape, making a luminous counterpart to Obama’s night sky, by Jean-Michel Pancin, and Stéphanie Bouvier’s winter forest.
Jean-Michel Pancin looks at the question of identity through the astral identity card, or “stellar ID”, of President Barack Obama. This is an astral map of the sky as it was at the exact time and place of Obama’s birth. It is set with Swarovski crystal, whose sparkle represents the magic of the stars in the astral night, but is also synonymous with precision in the measurement of time. In the history of the parasciences, it amplifies the vision of the mediums.
Stellar ID No. 4: Barack Hussein Obama II
Born on 4 August 1961 at 7:24 pm on the island of Oahu, Honolulu county, Hawaii, USA, 21n18, 157w51 / time zone AHST h10w (standard time).
Adriana Garcia Galan
Her multimedia works are often participative, and they give the impression of belonging to real life. Her audio installation Mouth is both playful and political, with articulated lips that deliver a looped speech by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President. Two presidents are thus presented side by side, symbolically, in a singular manifestation of the relationship between France and America.
Miss China & Tia Calli Borlase & Isadora Chen & YLWT
The fashion designer Bonnie Tchien Hy (alias Miss China) has created a “Blue White Red” installation of furniture for “luxury industry workers” – which is far from being a luxury, in fact! She has created a special collection: for men and women a customised blue work jacket, and white trousers with tricolour stripes; for women a red dress, padded at key points of the female anatomy, in a transformation of her “Shanghai Lady” dress by the artist Tia Calli Borlase. Both outfits can be accompanied by the “Ready to Hear” iPod, as customised by YLWT for Miss China Art Production – not forgetting the sports shoes (also YLWT), the customised “ParisStore” shopping bags, with their lifetime guarantee, and Isadora Chen’s “Bento-surprise”.