‘Deranged beauty’: how Hong Kong fashion designer Yeung Chin came to love the combination of opposing aesthetics

Experimental filmmaker, dramatist, poet and photographer Shuji Terayama’s film Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) is a bizarre, metatextual, phantasmagoric recreation of his own rural childhood; it is told as the story of a fictional director trying to reimagine his own childhood in film, such that it is often impossible to know what’s fact and what’s fiction.

Avant-garde Hong Kong fashion designer Yeung Chin, whose work deconstructs and reconfigures traditional styles of clothing, playing with unusual silhouettes and materials, tells Richard Lord how it changed his life.

I first saw the film when I was around 18 or 19 years old, because Silvio Chan showed it to us when I was studying fashion design. He was a professor at PolyU (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) but also organised Alternatif Workshop, a private fashion school in his studio.

Every week I had a tutorial with him; he was a mentor in the fashion business. He just showed us a few minutes from the film, and told us the director was a great film artist.

I thought it was really interesting and searched for him, and then spent a whole week watching his films. Every one of them impressed me very much. I had never been exposed to such deranged beauty.

I did not understand the content of the movie at all, because the first time I watched it was in Japanese. But the deepest feeling I got was from the flawless setting and the chemistry formed by the mismatch of characters.

It’s a film from the 70s, but when I saw it, it seemed very modern, very fashionable. It was most impressive to me: the images, the setting, the set design. After that, I watched it every two years. I last watched it six years ago.