Yunpei Li

Research Summary:

Inflatable-Wear can be considered inflated wearable installations, incorporating sculptural or performative elements, where new relations between body and space emerge. Furthermore, they create an intimate and dynamic embodied space for the wearer that transforms with body movements and embodied sensation. Inflatable-Wear as ‘embodied space’ has not been sufficiently discussed. Moreover, a research gap exists regarding such bodily expansion and inflated wearable installation to shape new spatial relationships. This research seeks to address this gap to intertwine the wearers and audiences of Inflatable-Wear’s embodied space as a community. 

Biography:

Yunpei Li is a PhD student currently enrolled at the London College of Fashion, where her research is centered on Inflatable-Wear and its transformative and affective potential, as well as the embodied wearing experiences and spatial relations it creates. Her PhD project at LCF developed from her MA work at the Royal College of Art, where she initially delved into inflatables and airflow. She interrogates the symbiotic relationships between the wearer, the audience, and the embodied spatial relations that emerge from Inflatable-Wear, derived space around the fashioned body, and the unforeseen encounters that arise from the wearing experience in kinetic public environments. She aims to create an embodied wearable installation and galvanise an inflatable interactive community of interest.

Supervisors: Michèle Danjoux, Lucy Orta and Eve Lin

Yunpei Li, Play with My Belly, 2021