The Art of Useless: Ma Ke’s Fashion Exhibit Useless (2007), Jia Zhangke’s Documentary Film Useless (2007), and Contemporary China’s Consumer Culture

This talk presents an aspiring Chinese fashion designer, Ma Ke, and her fashion exhibit Useless (2007). Ma intends to draw attention to the loss of the emotional bond between the maker and the user of clothes in the age of industrialized mass production and consumption. To help fashion recover this lost memory, Ma buries her apparel under dirt for a period of time. When the garment is unearthed, she reasons, it will find itself imbued with the imprint of the time and space of its soil. Presented at Paris Fashion Week in February 2007, Ma’s fashion exhibit Useless was intended to be a critique of modern consumer culture. My analysis then turns to Jia Zhangke’s documentary film Useless (2007), a transmedial dialogue with Ma’s fashion exhibit Useless. What characterizes the Useless documentary is its tripartite structure. Contrary to the second part of the documentary, which focuses on Ma’s middle-class fashion, the first part features a group of laborers in a garment factory in China’s Guangdong Province. These workers produce Ma’s first fashion line, Exception. Linking consumption to production, the director emphasizes the fact that Ma’s fashion is manufactured by the Chinese factory workers. The third part of the documentary turns to the working class in China’s Shanxi Province. With the rise of the market economy, the local tailors cannot compete with factories and department stores. To make a living, some tailors have to work as coal miners; thus, their expertise is rendered useless. In this talk, I argue that Jia’s documentary engagement with Ma’s fashion is double-edged: although he embraces some parts of Useless, he critiques other parts of her design. I demonstrate how the director brings a new level of visual complexity to the designer’s antifashion and anticonsumption gesture through the use of montage.

Dr. Calvin Hui will speak on “The Art of Useless: Ma Ke’s Fashion Exhibit Useless (2007), Jia Zhangke’s Documentary Film Useless (2007), and Contemporary China’s Consumer Culture” in a series organized by UNC’s Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. This event is free and open to the public and will be held as a Zoom meeting. Join virtually at go.unc.edu/Hui .

Please direct any questions on this event to Prof. Robin Visser.