Through the eyes of a former fashion guru

With more than 50 installations, sculptures, performances, collages, paintings and moving images, Martin Margiela has turned M Woods museum in Beijing into a veritable labyrinth of discovery.

The Beijing exhibition comes 14 years after Margiela abandoned a glittering internationally acclaimed career as a fashion designer and threw himself into being a full-time artist.

The exhibition, developed from close conversations between Margiela and the curators over more than a year, focuses on his exploration of art, material, the body, time, gender and audience participation through his experimental runway shows and research into textiles and fabrics since the 1980s.

After Wang Zongfu, curator of the Beijing exhibition, and Margiela had communicated by email for more than a year, the pair finally met in a Paris cafe this year.

"I didn't know what he looked like, and the famous portrait of him was out of date, but that day I walked straight to the man who I thought might be him, with an inexplicable confidence and intuition, and said hello," Wang says.

Margiela was casually dressed, wearing a plaid buttoned shirt, loose jeans, glasses clipped to his breast pocket, and a sample of the bracelet he had designed specifically for the exhibition in Beijing, Wang recalls. Margiela recognized the fabric of the souvenir T-shirt for the exhibition in his hand by twisting it.

The exhibition is jointly presented by the museum and the Fondation d'Entreprise Galeries Lafayette in Paris, which hosted Margiela's first solo exhibition in the world last year.

Margiela was born in Leuven, Belgium, in 1957, to a Polish father and a Belgian mother. When he was a child, he spent a lot of time in Paris and later worked there as well.

As a teenager he studied at Sint-Lukas Kunsthumaniora art school in Hasselt, Belgium, for three years, and entered the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1977.

After graduating he worked as a freelancer in Italy and Belgium before moving to Paris, where he worked as first assistant of the fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier from 1984 to 1987. In 1988, he founded Maison Martin Margiela in Paris with a unique and avant-garde style.

Margiela is said to be the first designer to introduce recycling in his creations, using army socks, broken crockery, flea market clothing and plastic packaging, among other things. His fashion often goes beyond the boundaries of clothing. The locations chosen for his fashion shows were normally unconventional: an abandoned metro station, a warehouse, and a vacant lot that has become legendary.

Early on Margiela forged links with the art world through exhibitions at a number of galleries in Europe. In 1997, while continuing to work for his own label, he was appointed creative director for women's ready-to-wear for the fashion brand Hermes and worked there for 12 seasons until 2003.

His dialogue between art and fashion first emerged in 1988 with his debut show at the Cafe Gare in Paris, which questioned representations of gender and power.

That show incorporated elements of surrealism and featured a large painting laid flat on the floor, created by the models as they walked on the canvas with red paint on the soles of their shoes.

In 2008, Margiela decided to leave fashion just after the 20th-anniversary show of Maison Martin Margiela.

From what he described as the "stifling system" of the fashion industry he switched his attention to the art space, a platform that, he says, asks questions, and on which one can discover alternative ways of thinking and developing long-term artistic interventions.

At M Woods museum in Beijing, Margiela has built a series of spaces that allow viewers to experience the exhibition as an alternative world.

The entire exhibition space is filled with the designer's characteristic visual cleanliness, with a lot of white background, reminding people of his all-white studio. Elements including fingernails, wigs and hair, which show the personality of modern people, are magnified; and sculptures with a classical sense of majesty, according to Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, who curated Margiela's first exhibition in Paris, tell of "the passing away of time".

The traditional entrance and exit of the museum are reversed; sculptures and installations such as Torso (2018-22) and Cartography (2019) need to be activated in an interactive performance; and he has used the museum's old canteen as the main image for his large installation Monument on the front facade of the museum.

Vanitas (2019), for example, is formed using several silicone heads covered with wigs of different colors. The hair color goes from blond to gray, which reflects human aging and death. The artwork is inspired by the namesake philosophy from Dutch still life paintings in the 17th century that discuss death. Margiela expresses the concept with a long history in a modern way through the materials he used in fashion design.

Margiela wrote in an email to Wang last year: "I became fascinated with fashion early on, and I wish to present it in the most conceptual way possible. I need to explore other mediums and enjoy pure creation without boundaries."

Wang says: "It is best to look at Margiela's art and fashion work from different perspectives, as his creative perspective as a designer is completely different from being an artist. As a contemporary artist, Margiela has studied Dadaism, abstract expressionism and Renaissance art, and has tried to apply them to his own artistic creations."

If you go

11 am-7 pm, daily except Mondays until Dec 4; M Woods Hutong, 38 Qianliang Hutong, 95 Longfusi Street, Dongcheng district, Beijing.