Fabulous frocks: Chinese artist takes fashion to its extremes with wearable art for a cause – ‘maybe people say I’m crazy’

After a nervous breakdown, Kong Ning turned to art as a form of therapy. She paints, writes and makes ‘behavioural art’

The 62-year-old creates extraordinary dresses, metres long and weighing up to 50kg, with political and environmental messages and wears them around the world

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Kong Ning, a 62-year-old artist from Inner Mongolia, China, creates dresses that highlight pressing issues – such as this dress made of red masks she designed to raise awareness of global warming. The red masks represent people feeling hot and burned.

Published: 5:00am, 7 Jan 2020Updated: 7:28pm, 7 Jan 2020

Most women choose what they wear to flatter their bodies. For Chinese artist Kong Ning, though, fashion is a soapbox she can employ to call people’s attention to some of the most pressing issues affecting the world.

And when she uses that soapbox, Kong goes the whole hog.

In 2015, she wore an outfit dotted with hundreds of 3M N95 masks (anti-pollution breathing masks) and traipsed around smog-choked Beijing. In 2013, she stitched 999 respirators onto a wedding dress which she titled “Marry the Blue Sky” and wore it at the Beijing Exhibition Centre. In 2016, she wore a wedding dress – made of 100 inflatable white doves – at the National September 11 Memorial site and in Times Square in New York.

To make people aware of how important heritage preservation is, she attached plastic models of Notre Dame Cathedral to a dress.

Kong Ning in a dress made of blue pinwheels in Beijing in 2017. She created this dress in the hopes the wheels will blow the smog in Beijing away.

Kong Ning wearing a leaf dress in Beijing’s National Stadium in 2015. The leaves have turned grey due to pollution.

Fabulous frocks: Chinese artist takes fashion to its extremes with wearable art for a cause – ‘maybe people say I’m crazy’

After a nervous breakdown, Kong Ning turned to art as a form of therapy. She paints, writes and makes ‘behavioural art’ The 62-year-old creates extraordinary dresses, metres long and weighing up to 50kg, with political and environmental messages and wears them around the world

After a nervous breakdown, Kong Ning turned to art as a form of therapy. She paints, writes and makes ‘behavioural art’

The 62-year-old creates extraordinary dresses, metres long and weighing up to 50kg, with political and environmental messages and wears them around the world