LACOSTE challenged Chinese artist Li Xiaofeng to create two different polos for the2010 Holiday Collector’s Series. For both, he had to adapt his work methods slightly. For the limited editionprinted polo, he chose blue and white shards with lotus and children designs from the Kangxi Period (1662 - 1772 AD) of the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911 AD). The lotus grows from mud underwater to emerge as a flower, symbolising purity and rebirth. Images of babies represent fertility, as during that period the high infant mortality rate meant that people decorated ceramics with babies hoping they would be blessed with children.
Li Xiaofeng trained as a muralist but turned to sculpture to explore a new concept and expression of Chinese landscapes. His choice of material is unexpected; instead of marble, wood or even glass, he prefers buying shards of broken porcelain recovered from ancient archeological digs, some dating from the Ming Dynasty, and then shaping and polishing them, drilling holes into each corner and linking them together with silver wire to create ’rearranged landscapes’. It is fitting that these poetic pieces, which have been perhaps best described as ‘post-orientalism’, usually take the form of clothing, including traditional Chinese dresses and jackets as well as neckties and military uniforms. They are ultimately ‘wearable’ although certainly promise to be as heavy as any armour and would require a strong retinue of dressers to don and doff.
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