3 Experiments of Translation

Slide 1
The material I selected is a ‘sewable, co-creative, wearable’ magazine: Booklook issue 2 Shirt. It explores DIY practices within the fashion field.

The publication examines how DIY magazines focused on sewing, crocheting, and pattern-making influence consumer behavior, highlighting how DIY practices become tools to transform mainstream narratives and create change.​

Slide 2
Booklook emphasizes: Wearing is Publishing is Reading.
The book contains stitch patterns and offers English, Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish versions. This allows readers to use the patterns to remake their ‘Booklook Shirt.’​

Slide 3
I transfer text from the surface of books onto the body, so that everyone can become a creator, ‘wearing’ words on their skin, using the body as a way and method of communication. This responds to the call of the original concept: Wearing is Publishing is Reading.

The original content transforms from ‘being read’ into ‘a practice of collective performance,’ where meaning is continuously generated and re-arranged through creation and interaction.

Slide 6
I use Hybridizing to remake multi-national stitch styles into a ‘special crochet version,’ re-arranging crochet into a cultural language. This strengthens the shirt’s role as a visual declaration.

Within diverse cultural contexts, these visual declarations create different interpretations, thus further dissolving the boundaries between designer and audience.

Slide 7
I changed the magazine’s folding structure and layout, separating text and images onto different pages. Audience must fold and stitched the magazine first — only then do these elements become readable content.

Audience can try different folding ways, each ways aligns different pages and produces different sequences of text or images, placing interpretive control in the audience hands.