Yifan Gao

Yifan Gao was born in Wuxi, China. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in Fashion Jewellery at London College of Fashion in 2018 and went on to study Ceramic&Glass at the Royal College of Art. As a jewellery designer, her work has repeatedly appeared in London Fashion Week as well as in international fashion magazines such as i:D, Vogue Italia, Dazed and WWD. With her jewellery collection “Lab”, she took part in the London design festival and the Premiere Classe showroom in France in 2016. Her collaboration with Xiaoming Shan on Central Saint Martin’s womenswear runway won the Special Award in 2017. She also produced and directed the fashion film “Les Twins”, which was shortlisted for the Filming East Shorts Award. In 2020, her glasswork appeared in SCHÖN Magazine.   

Ever since the invention of the modern machine and algorithms, humankind has been hypothesising about the future of our society with advanced technologies and the coexistence of us and artificial intelligence. But what if such coexistence is forced to take place underwater, now that climate change or disasters can be imminent upon us if we do not take actions fast enough? Yifan's project explores the possibility of just that, where a highly advanced civilisation has adapted to an Atlantis-like living environment. Human beings will have returned to the one place where life started, and the hyper-intelligent future tech is formed in symbiosis with sea creatures and structures. Here, the organic and the artificial are blended together, which is what her visual combination of metal and glass - also of geometric forms and seemingly arbitrary structures - presents.  

Her project imagines how humans have a future.....