More than a Housewife功夫
Documentary / 33’37”
Above video is trailer
KWONG Hiu Yung, Doris 鄺曉融
2020 BA Creative Media graduate
Abstract
This is a documentary film about exploring my mother’s conduct of life and aesthetics as a couture tailor, thus seeing her relationship between her customers, family and the society. My filming mainly included three tasks: In the first task, I focused on filming my mother as a professional couture tailor. I filmed how she deal with her customers and her skills of tailoring. The second part, I filmed her daily life and see her identity as a mother. The third part, I interviewed her to explore more about her life and stories.
Description
The objective of my project is to document my mother’s life philosophy by exploring her career instead of focusing my shooting on my mother’s tailoring skills, and it is influenced by the movie “The Grandmaster” by Wong Kar-wai, 2013.
I have watched both the Ip Man Series by Wong Pak-ming and The Grandmaster, they have the same subject but the exploring topic is totally different. The Ip Man Series mainly focus on the fighting movement and The Grandmaster is more focus on the inner concept of Wing Chun and the attitude of Ip Man. As a person who also practice Wing Chun, I think The Grandmaster can brought the world of Wing Chun to the audience more because it is difficult for the people who do not practice martial art to understand the philosophy by just watching the movement, and it is the same case in my project. Both martial art and tailoring work are called “kung fu” in Chinese, only tailor can understand the philosophy of a tailor since they practice it by themselves. If other people want to know their world and philosophy, showing how they react to different issues and their way to cope with people is a better way. This is also the reason my work title is called “功夫” in Chinese.
On the other hand, “needlework” is known as “女紅針黹” in the traditional Chinese society, which is one of the (婦功) standard to evaluate woman as a good wife. And “couture” is a French word of dressmaking or needlework, which is used to describe the clothing produced by fashion designers. However, “couture” means more than that, it is not only about covering the body, but a presentation of your taste, lifestyle and status. Therefore, I have given my artwork title as “More than a Housewife”, I hope my audience can find more layers when watching the film.
Artist Statement
This year is the best time to make an artwork about my mother since she is turning to 60 years old and will be retired gradually, and I will be graduate and join the work force very soon. I believe there will not be much chance to make artwork about her after graduation, so I decided to film my mother in this project. I have chosen my mother as the subject of my film instead of the other family members because couture tailor is a special and uncommon industry in Hong Kong recently, as a big fan of history and culture, it is an interesting topic for me to explore. Moreover, I have been living in a small-tailoring-factory-liked home since I was born, most of the people I know from my mother is in the related industry. Therefore, finding footages about couture and tailor is at my fingertips, I can have a deeper exploration about this.
Although I grow up in the environment that full of beautiful couture and clothes, I do not have a great interest in it. It might be too close and easy to reach. I feel pity that my mother’s craftsmanship will be lost, but I do not have any intension to learn any skills about tailoring yet. Therefore, making this film is a chance of me to see whether I am interested in making couture or not.
In this entire process, I have learnt that the aesthetics of a couture tailor is about fitting: In the perspective of tailoring, the clothes should fit the body and the taste of the people who wear; In the perspective of conduct of life, it is about minding your behavior in your social identity(懂分寸)and fitting with people appropriately to maintain relationships.
