Meet Wenjüe Lu’s Slow Poems
The relationship between poetry and fashion has proved itself to be a rich one.
How can somebody translate a poem into wearable clothes? New York-based artist and designer Wenjue or “Lulu” prefers treating each of them as an individual piece of artwork crafted by hand. In 2020, she and Michael launched the label Wenjüe Lu as an opportunity to spread this beautiful traditional handicraft. The brand creates a dialogue between the clothes and sculptures, exploring different shades and textures of white, as well as the urge of people to slow down. In Wenjue’s words: “The poem inside you, that is, your own feelings about the image I provide, they are also you. What you see and think about me, your eyes and my eyes, your thoughts and my thoughts, in the poem everything is one.”
Lifelong Mending Initiative
“In Wenjüe Lu, we believe each creation of ours is a source of eternal companionship for the body, this belief is actualized under our Lifelong Mending Initiative. The process of mending becomes that of morphing, the commodity becomes your lifelong exclusive property. We encourage you to buy less and buy what you love, and every Wenjüe Lu piece will last you a lifetime and stay uniquely yours the more you use it. Create memories with care, with every use, every wear.”
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Karen: You launched the label Wenjüe Lu in 2020. What motivated you to do it and how has this process been since then?
Michael: Two years ago, when the pandemic hit, it mixed with Lulu's graduation. Everything was amateur and chaotic and it was pretty much the reason why she felt the need to start making things for the sake of creating. It was just a different way of approaching creation.
When Lulu finished her Fashion Design degree, she grew to almost hate her own definition of fashion and her own limitation on understanding the relationship between garments, clothes, and our bodies. When Lulu first started to design these flower-shaped bags, the Fafa Bags, I immediately recognized the design speaks her language; these bags are not commercial and lacked functionality. But it’s about how to recreate the imaginaries of flowers in her own way.
Photographer: Shuyi Chen.
Karen: What is the philosophy behind Wenjüe Lu? Does it align with your life convictions and ideologies?
Michael: Our philosophy is pretty much aligned with our goal to slow down life. In everything we do, we try our hardest to inject, in a very particular and articulated way, slowness into the works. No matter the presentation or the medium because we think that our language itself is very limited and that speaks and shines to the realm of creation. We want to bring the slowness and combine that with crafts.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Karen: Who/what inspires you artistically?
Michael: We really like Japanese sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, who once said that everything is a sculpture. Any material or any idea born into space he would consider sculptures. This idea really influenced us in our relationship with objects as we see and perceive them as energy. This reminds us that there are people who look at the world this way and that they are doing good work. That inspired us to keep going and to do expressions that might seem non-ordinary.
Photos: Courtesy of the artist.
Karen: What is it about the white color that moves you and inspires your creations?
Michael: We work with the “off-white” but not because of the whiteness as a sense of purity. It is definitely not a skin color reference but a thought on how the fabric or cotton is bleached and chemically treated. That bleached tone that we are used to seeing in fashion is the one we call “white.” It is chemically decolored and we are so used to it being that “white.” We are really trying to make that differentiation. Maybe the fabric looks a little bit different from the “white” but that’s actually the real color. We try to emphasize that by trying to use the natural states of cotton and different fibers to use them as the canvas.
Karen: Your “soft sculptures” seem like magical living beings. What stories do you want to tell through these pieces?
Michael: In our multidisciplinary and multimedium effort as a studio, we create a garments collection that is not fashion. Meaning, we make clothes that are not necessarily considered “fashionable” but we also make sculptures that are not hard as concrete as a conventional sculpture would be. We call them “soft sculptures” and they are more like fine art approaches. We also do in-person Sashiko workshops a couple of times every month in our studio. We love inviting people and teaching them how to do Sashiko and we try to do everything to get that connection with the people and get communication started.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Karen: How do your poems develop and how does writing converge with your design creations?
Michael: Poem is one of the many different mediums we try to work with. They are written in Chinese by Wenjue and then translated into English by me. We enjoy art so much that we want to appreciate it in all of its possible ways. We love film, literature and philosophy, poetry, and, fiction. So it is almost impossible for me not to create. What we like the most about poems is you don’t have to say everything so clearly but then people know because it is an emotion that is a different take on the language that we use typically every day to speak. Poem is limited by language and written language but then is like art, sculpture, cloth, or doing a film. It becomes its own little entity that contains that energy and emotion and becomes a solo expression.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Karen: What's the most challenging thing about running a crafted hand business?
Michael: It’s challenging to be so utopian without a business structure. With these mannequins or “soft sculptures,” we were trying to tell the difference with what we were doing because mannequins in my time in school were ugly; we were trying to fit clothes that eventually you are going to put on human bodies, but we were trying to make the best next thing and we felt the necessity to reimagine them. So it goes back to that metaphysical space where we were pulling all those imageries and all those references from that beautiful and romantic chaos.