Just a perfect day to go back in time five years, re-hash some China fine fashion trivia and re-watch an oldie but goodie: “Perfect Night” by China’s Electro Dame Shang Wenjie. This 2012 music video reveals some major Neo morphing, me gusta mucho Masha Ma and much more. It’s all about that dark romance.
Her 2012 video “Perfect Night” sees Shang perform a haunting tale of love and war wearing sculptural dresses by designer Masha Ma.
At times, or “at nausea”, referred to as that “Bad Romance” chanteuse of The East, Shanghai-born Shang mixes steely electronic beats with a deep and husky-yet-powerful voice creating a stark musical contrast between light and dark. She first found herself topping the charts upon winning the 2006 edition of China’s television singing contest “Super Girls”; in 2011, the then 29-year-old took home Music Radio’s Best Female Singer award to cement her place as China’s pop icon du decade.
Hip to the fame game ever since, coverage with a dark-cloud-lining has sometimes overtaken creative credibility with too much focus being placed on the super-facial side of the artistic persona Shang has created for and by herself. The rumor mill surrounding this songstress has been churning for a while now. Tales of her multiple plastic surgery procedures run rife, with Shang’s highly-beauty-filtered pictures being put through the meticulous inspection mechanisms of China’s social media and online fan communities. Of visibly high truth value these reports may very well be, Temper Magazine focuses on the Ultimate China Fashion Promotor Shang undeniably has become — and shall remain. And “Perfect Night” is a perfect example.
Inspired by goth subcultures and the macabre romance of Alexander McQueen, the track appears on Shang’s album “Ode to Doom,” an album that takes both its createuse and listener on an explorative journey through spirituality, love and death. In her video for “Perfect Night,” directed by Cinematographer Theo Stanley, Shang performs, in her own words, “a haunting tale of love and war, morphing into an eerie nocturnal creature enveloped in smoke and flames emphasized by the sculptural dresses of designer Masha Ma.”
A bona fide fashion muse, Shang has been working with emerging Chinese designers, such as Central Saint Martins graduate Ma, since her rise to fame. “The white and black forms worked well for the composite effects and provided a canvas for the prismatic color projections,” says Stanley of Ma’s creations. “I developed a visual treatment which focused on a combined language of prisms, crystals, smoke and fire elements.”
Now watch and learn from this mohair-loving minx. And always remember the wisdom of Salvador Dali: “Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.”
Video copyright@Nowness.
Perpetually in pursuit of the greater good that is “China Fashion”, van Paridon set up The China Temper to help promote the dynamite dynamic fashion scene sprouting within Beijing, Shanghai, and China overall. Catering to anybody and everybody who reads English and/or Chinese, Temper covers all the basics and bases. From China's street style scenery to its budding photographers, internationally renowned designers, and underground quirks plus phenomena: We present one hot-hip-happening current collective weaving The New "Made in China" tag.
The term “Made in China” is undergoing the ultimate 21st Century makeover. Escorted by the increasingly strong influence of a new thinking among China’s younger generations, regarding individuality and the expression thereof, the fashion scene in the Middle Kingdom is exploding. And stretches far beyond what meets the eye. It’s appliqué, one might say.
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