STYLE Edit: Saint Laurent teams up with Chinese film director Wong Kar-wai for A Night in Shanghai, the fifth chapter in its SELF project
Ask cinema pundits to name China’s most romantic auteur and they will probably point to Wong Kar-wai. The Hong Kong grandmaster’s In the Mood for Love is frequently listed as one of the greatest films of all time. In a 2016 survey by the BBC, critics from around the world voted it as the second best film of the 21st century.
Add China’s most romantic city and one of the world’s most romantic luxury labels, and you get the short film A Night in Shanghai. It’s the fifth chapter in Saint Laurent’s SELF project; a series of works commissioned to capture different aspects of the brand’s personality.
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As curator, Wong is following in the footsteps of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, Italian performance artist Vanessa Beecroft, US author and director Bret Easton Ellis and Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noé. Hong Kong-based image maker Wing Shya directed the project.
“Wong Kar-wai envisions individual feelings; his art is like a vivid dream projected into real life, which emphasises the contrast between the fragile aspect of humanity and reality,” says Saint Laurent’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello.
A confessed fan of Wong, Vaccarello approached his idol and then worked with him on the project. “It was a very instinctive process based on mutual respect and admiration,” he says. “In the movie you can find and feel the Saint Laurent fantasy taking shape as a natural consequence.”
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Wong is equally complementary about the French fashion house and its Belgian chief designer. “Saint Laurent is unique, distinctive among high fashion,” he says. “Anthony loves art and his designs worn gorgeously, and stays independent. Saint Laurent is always about ‘breaking the balance’ in this era. Like no one else, the brand is brave in expressing itself.”
Balance, indeed, is a theme in A Night in Shanghai, the city in which Wong was born before his family moved to Hong Kong. It stars model Ju Xiaowen as a wire walker trying to find equilibrium in real life by comparing the past and the present. As the backdrop, Wong skilfully juxtaposes the city’s old, traditional spirit with its modern metropolitan skyline. He uses the same golden, gloaming palette that infuses his earlier iconic works such as Chunking Express and Days of Being Wild with such dreamlike intensity.
Saint Laurent SELF05 A Night in Shanghai will be exclusively presented in an immersive screen-installation at Yuz Museum in the Shanghai art district, open to the public from November 22-24.
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Wong Kar-wai, director of In the Mood for Love, returns to the city of his birth to work on the Saint Laurent SELF05 short film, A Night in Shanghai, with Hong Kong photographer Wing Shya, as the brand continues to explore its personality