Artist Jeffrey Wang uses recycled Levi’s to challenge our perceptions about functional fashion and art.

Persona, Jeffrey Wang‘s collaboration with Levi’s and Taiwan’s Fubon Art Foundation appears to be inspired by necessity. In creating the work, there was no cutting, sewing or technical changes to the jeans. He deliberately used only safety pins to create art out of recycled Levi’s. Wang’s interpretation of the blue jean suggests that we rethink the way we look at denim, while allowing us to preserve – in our minds and in our closets – their shape and familiarity.

Wang, who’s from Taipei, says of his work :

“My artwork has always been a crossover of fashion and art…Obtaining depth in the concept, but visually modern and fashionable.”

Persona was commissioned as an art project by Levi’s and the Fubon Group, a Taiwanese foundation whose philosophy holds closely to a quote by Leo Tolstoy :

“Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications.”

When we consider the ubiquity of denim in our modern lives, it seems Wang’s work has achieved this. His challenge was to have us feel differently about something we all know intimately. Taken out of context, however, one cannot help but see the possibilities in this common material as something more.  The beautiful results provide a moment’s opportunity to see art in the ordinary.

Watch the creative process in this video of Wang’s photo shoot with photographer Liang Su.

Eco, trends, art, creativity and how they tumble through social media to shape culture fascinate EcoSalon columnist Dominique Pacheco. Her personal blog, mixingreality, speaks to these topics daily, and here at EcoSalon, she takes a weekly look at the intersection of eco and art. We call it heARTbeat.

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