Sze-Hin Jason Leung

The Uncannny

An experiment on the bodily perception and space via filmmaking and fashion.

This thesis project is an experiment on the agency of the bodily perception in architectural space, using a filmic environment, and garment construction, as a lens through which to understand, and re-script the formality of the immediate surrounding, social codes, and our own self-perception. It investigates the relationship between bodily identities and architectural space, through repositioning the contextual body as a dynamic mediator between the sensorial and symbolic understanding of space. By manipulating bodily perception using garment, the project aims to take on our conceived cultural structures, and reinterpret the hierarchical nature of the perceived reality.

Adopting a practice-based methodology, the project unfolds within a non-normative environment: a corporate office where time loops and routine repeats, until a small disruption forces its way into the mundanity of the office. By systematically destabilizing normative configuration of corporeality and spatiality through abstracted frame and time, the film examines the reciprocal modulation of garment design elements that traditionally associate with specific context, reframing them through the uncanny approach. 

Garment-making becomes an act of spatial manipulation, Seams, cuts and folds are wielded as tools to alter the bodily experience. Within the seemingly mundane office setting, these bodily shifts create a quiet estrangement, reframing what was once certain. It subtly challenges the bodily relationship of individuals with the contextual space. It re-examines traditional anatomy and construction techniques: using strategic manipulation of bodily silhouette and fine detailing, questioning the traditionally perceptive identities. By disrupting familiar bodily archetypes within the seemingly conventional setting of an office, the design engages with the viewer’s instinctive reading of both body and space. 

By entwining garment design and filmmaking, the project seeks to reveal the spatial consequences of alternative bodily variables in the form of narrated visual story: a narrated visual study between body and architecture, between what is seen and what is felt. An audacious attempt to explore the subliminal ways space and bodily identity shape, and are shaped by, the clothed body.