Cultural: fashionable museum trip

My home is Holland, awesome country but lots of rainy days... So what do you do you visit a museum. Sounds dull right? Well, actually it wasn't. Currently the Groninger Museum, in Groningen, features two great exhibitions. One by Dutch designer Iris van Herpen and the other exhibition is by Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen.

Iris van Herpen is a Dutch award winning designer who is known for her remarkable creations and use of unusual materials like wood, the whalebones of a children's umbrella, plastic and glass. The exhibition gives an overview of her designs from 2008 up till now. The somewhat futuristic but inspiring designs are very impressive and definitely museum worthy.

 

Yin Xiuzhen is a Chinese artist who creates art objects out of second hand clothes. Yin explains her idea and vision as follow:

‘Clothes say a lot about a person. At a single glance they recount how big a person is, his or her age, style, gender and income. But they also narrate invisible information such as the memory of a certain period when the piece was worn, and the reason why it was kept.’ 

My favorite piece in her collection are the 'Portable Cities'. As Yin was waiting at the airport she was wondering what everyone was carrying around in their suitcases, since in one way it represents their home. Inspired by this she created cities out of clothes in suitcases. The suitcases belonged to people from all over the world and the clothes that were used were from the person from that city which is represented in the suitcase.

The Iris van Herpen Exhibition will run till 23/09/2012 and the Yin Xiuzhen exhibition will run till 18/11/2012 in The Groninger Museum, Groningen The Netherlands