Jingbo Q&A
Jingbo comes from Tsingtao, China, and is currently based in Milan. His work moves between fashion, digital art and mixed media, driven by personal history, visual culture and a constant process of self-discovery.
-Where are you from?
- I’m from Tsingtao, in China.
-What kind of background did you grow up with?
- My father is an artist, he does traditional Chinese painting, very large-scale works, sometimes six or eight meters wide. My mother is a teacher. I think growing up between these two worlds gave me balance: freedom on one side, discipline on the other. Both of them gave me space to just be.
-How did you end up choosing art and fashion?
- In China, it’s not easy to be an artist. At the high school level, if you want to study art, you have to be extremely well prepared for the art exam in your final year. Nearly 300,000 people are drawing the same thing, and not everyone makes it. I chose that path early.. Later, I decided to study at Istituto Marangoni, but honestly, it was during my studies that I really understood how much I liked fashion and its dynamics. I love offering a new way of thinking. I’m very into the history of fashion, designers like Martin Margiela really inspire me. In China there isn’t much storytelling around fashion, and discovering that narrative side really fascinated me! Actually at the beginning I was torn between fashion and fine arts, but I don’t think I would have excelled in fine arts alone. Through fashion, or through this hybrid form of art I feel I have more to say…
-How would you describe your style or your work?
- It’s many things at once. Mixed media, not only fashion-related. I haven’t produced garments yet, starting a brand is difficult because the production chain is huge, but my work exists through art, digital pieces, visuals. I see it as a deconstruction of my life: music, cinema, personal experiences all come into it.
-What are your main artistic influences?
- Musically, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Visually, artists like Francis Bacon. I’m learning who I am through what I create, it’s a process, not a fixed identity. But what I can surely say is that my visual imagination started with manga and anime. I approached that world around eleven years old, not super young, but it really opened something for me.
-What were your expectations of Milan before moving here?
- As one of the world’s capitals of fashion and design, I imagined a city full of elegant people. Which is not always true, hahah. I like Milan, I feel good here. Sometimes, in the more peripheral areas where I live, I feel people aren’t very used to foreigners, which is strange because there’s already plenty of second generation immigrants. That’s a negative side.
And… there are too many maranza (laughs). Yes, in Italian (editor’s note). I am also quite connected to the Chinese community in Milan. I live with other Chinese guys, some studied with me at high-school and we moved here together, some study restoration at Accademia di Brera. We were all quite fascinated but the Italian arts course at high-school, and look where we are now… I’ve also done some modelling. A friend of mine is a supermodel and introduced me to it, I thought “why not?”, but that’s not really my thing.
-If you were a object?
- An old sketchbook with a lot of pictures.
-If you were a city?
- Perhaps Berlin.
-If you were a geometric shape?
- A circle.
-If you were a food?
- McDonald’s fries, long and thin, like me.
-What would be your music for the Club Couture?
- Definitely something by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
