_ bleu
tag: [work] [phygital] [digi]
date: 20220111
classification: Adidas 3a storefront installation
location: HKRI Taikoo Hui Shanghai China & Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li Chengdu China
collaborator: Fanglu Lin
team: Yibo Yuan, Yifan Zhang
Commissioned for the 2022 Spring/Summer release of Adidas Originals Blue, Bleu was developed as a storefront installation for Adidas 3A locations in Shanghai and Chengdu. Conceived as an unfinished space and a work in progress, the project exposes the atmosphere of production rather than presenting a resolved retail image. The installation carries the ad hoc, backstage, and unchoreographed qualities of a collection photoshoot into the storefront itself.
The project brings together Fanglu Lin’s handcrafted tie-dye practice, rooted in techniques associated with the Bai nationality in China, and Nero He’s digitally animated reinterpretations of those material processes. Rather than treating physical craft and digital simulation as separate modes of representation, Bleu places them in direct exchange.
The physical installation was developed through repeated translation between textile behavior, image, animation, and fabrication. Tie-dyed forms are sampled, enlarged, distorted, and reconstructed across physical and digital media, allowing each version to inform the next.
The project treats fabrication less as the execution of a fixed design than as a negotiated process between material behavior and digital interpretation. What emerges is not a seamless fusion of craft and computation, but a continuous feedback loop in which physical and digital conditions remain visibly distinct while reshaping one another.
