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Serina Lee

Istituto Marangoni: Fashion, Art and Design

I have a MA in Fashion Design from Istituto Marangoni London and I specialise in embroidery and hand-painted textiles. With 17 years of experience in traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, my practice explores the intersection of fashion and art, with each garment serving as a canvas for my paintings and textile works. My work bridges physical and virtual realms, creating art through traditional craft methods while exploring virtual realities that evolve from my physical garments and paintings. By blending traditional techniques with fashion and textiles, alongside emerging digital platforms, I seek to explore the integration of traditional crafts into both fashion and the metaverse. Whether working with physical materials or digital spaces, my work aims to reimagine heritage art forms for a future-facing world. I was awarded the Hand & Lock Prize 2024 as well as the Harper’s Bazaar NewGen Fashion Award 2022 for my blend of traditional crafts with fashion and technology.

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se0dich, Integrating Traditional Chinese Art into Fashion for the Metaverse

Category: Apparel

Competitions: Fashion Competition 2025

This project explores the integration of traditional Chinese art into fashion design within the metaverse, highlighting how technology can both preserve and innovate cultural heritage. A fictional world named Se0dich is created, merging Chinese painting, calligraphy, fashion, and technology. I designed a virtual environment using my Chinese painting artworks, a physical fashion collection, and digital garments for avatars within this space. The world of Se0dich exists in a state of ma, a void in time and space, contemplating the concept of suspended time and spatial emptiness. It has its own rules and language system, which directly inform the shape and construction of the garments. The language system is created by identifying Chinese characters that visually resemble the English alphabet and writing them in Clerical Script. Though visually similar, the two symbols carry vastly different meanings, highlighting the complexities of cross-cultural interpretation and reflecting on bilingualism from an artist’s perspective. The language system informs the garments. The garments are hand-painted and hand-embroidered onto natural cotton, ethically sourced in London. The textiles reflect the virtual world of Se0dich. The materiality of the garments is inspired by traditional Chinese painting tools such as rice paper and calligraphy scrolls. I work with traditional materials and ancient crafts of Chinese painting and embroidery, combining them with emerging technologies to propel these time-honoured techniques into the future. This fusion embodies a relationship between nature and humans, rooted in history yet evolving with technology. The collection explores bilingualism through the intersection of language, culture, and medium — bridging English and Chinese, human and nature, digital and physical, Web2 and Web3. Garments are hand-painted with traditional Chinese brush strokes and hand-embroidered, creating a tactile connection to ancient craftsmanship while engaging with the virtual realm. This project honours materials that are alive, natural, and imbued with history by employing traditional materials and the ancient crafts of Chinese painting and embroidery, techniques refined over centuries. My Chinese paintings integrated into virtual reality address pollution by portraying beautiful nature within a virtual space that exists perennially, untouched by pollution. This virtual reality represents an idealised world, contrasting real life but inspired by natural elements. It is about the bridge between past and present, languages, and narratives.

In association with Arts Thread

Working with our partners at Arts Thread to develop lifelong learning and career opportunities for students of fashion and design. Our partnership provides the opportunity to compete on a world stage, participate in industry led workshops, set up an outstanding portfolio and gain access to the resources that will kickstart careers in fashion and design.