Ping Chen

Thing in Itself

Ping Chen is a London-based artist and fashion designer exploring how clothing can carry personal memory while reflecting on broader ideas of masculinity, care, and cultural heritage through wearable art and textiles. Drawing from his own experience and research, Chen translates memories, gestures, and lived experiences into garments. His work approaches fashion as a space where the body, personal histories, and cultural narratives can be embodied, questioned, and reimagined.

Rooted in memories of Ping Chen’s great-grandfather and reflections on traditional Chinese family structures, ‘Thing in Itself’ explores how clothing can embody memory, identity, and cultural values and reconsider masculinity through everyday gestures of care and domestic labour. By combining tailoring with reversible, modular, and transformable structures, the collection allows lived experience to shape its material and form. Rather than proposing a new ideal of masculinity, the collection invites viewers to reconsider the relationships between the body, clothing, and care.