|
"What I tend to do in my own manner - very quietly - is to break down traditions. Ban the rules is what I'm about," says Yeohlee Teng, who has been mining her own gently revolutionary vein for the past two decades. Now Teng, whose seasonless geometrical designs have earned her a coterie of fiercely loyal fans that includes museum curators from New York to Paris to Rotterdam, is the subject of "Yeohlee: Work, Material Architecture" (Peleus Press). The book surveys Teng's creations since the days when she and her downtown friends papered Manhattan to advertise a 1984 show at the arts space P.S. 1. Though Teng is known for exploring the territory where art and fashion collide (the P.S. 1 show included
|
a dress that morphed into a settee), she usually produces highly wearable if deeply interesting clothes.
An early-eighties cape, modeled by a crystal-ball-holding Lisa Lyon in a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, for example, is on one level a truly subversive garment (Yeohlee describes it as a little igloo you build around yourself) but on another, not too esoteric to catch the eye of Bergdorf Goodman, which placed a substantial order. It became, like so much of Yeohlee's work, a serene best-seller. - LYNN YAEGER
|
