3. Interior Display
Muyang Tang
Muyang is a spatial designer from Shanghai with an academic background in interior and theatre design. He has been trained and practised in Milan and London.
EDUCATION:
MA Interior Design, Royal College of Art, London, 2018-2020
BA Scenography (cum laude), Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, 2013 – 2017
EXPERIENCE:
Design research assistant, The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, London, Nov 2019
Associate event art director, fashion show ‘FAY- Ready for Departure’ at Milan fashion week, Milan, Dec 2017 – Apr 2018
Associate production designer, Opera ‘The Magic Flute’ at Auditorio de Tenerife, Santa Cruz De Tenerife, Jul 2017 – Apr 2018
Associate production designer, Opera ‘Don Carlo’ at Theater St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Sep 2017 – Mar 2018
Event art director assistant, YOOX NET-A-PORTOR GROUP, May 2017 – Jun 2017
"Being an outsider within different disciplines has allowed me to discover alien worlds that can inspire each other."
— Hussein Chalayan
As a spatial designer with a background in theatre and interior design, I find it exhilarating to merge different disciplines to create new types of experiential environment. I apply a unique design appraoch to my practice: I translate the design brief into the 'script', treat people's inhabitation as the 'content', and design the narrative space as the 'frame'. I believe these three elements are equally important.
I make the windows, through which the inhabitants can notice the landscape in the distance; I build the prosceniums, through which the audiences can witness a bizarre sight from another world; I adjust the spotlights in museums, through which the visitors can distinguish between ready-made art and real everyday objects.
I then attempt to weave the 'content' into the 'frame' according to different 'scripts' to leave people memorable spatial experiences.
This project uses Chalayan as the subject and Gallery 39 in the North Court of the V&A Museum as the site. It explores a specific type of experiential narrative environment that combines fashion marketing with the cultural atmosphere of the museum, namely 'Immersive Brandscape'. It communicates an in-depth brand philosophy with an already engaged audience and has the potential to reinvigorate the museum in the post-COVID era with a new, inquisitive, and experience hungry audience.
The exhibition space is divided into seven sections, starting with an introduction lobby and ending with a hybrid digital fashion show. The five spaces in the middle are themed with five keywords of Chalayan: 'Territory', 'Displacement', 'Separation', 'Transformation', and 'Value'. These themes are deeply related to his childhood, beliefs, obsessions, and fears and it is these elements that made him uniquely identifiable as an 'outsider'.
In each of these five spaces, a selection of garments from his iconic collections is displayed, and accordingly featured with a surreal immersive environment: a no man's land covered with golden dry grass, a foggy black water pool, a jet engine blowing a huge sphere gliding overhead, a time tunnel composed of silhouettes and mirrors and an archeological site. These display environments are not only used as a 'framework' to contextualize exhibits but also used to 'frame' behaviours and emotions of the audience to leave them with a memorable experience.
