Two recent Hong Kong exhibitions highlighted the potential of clothing as an art form. The Sotheby’s-hosted Ozymandias: Myths of the Near Future, which wrapped up last month, was the result of an academic exploration of how fashion designs might look like in a post-apocalyptic future. Dreamedcore, on the other hand, features works by artists and designers whose design aesthetic is often informed by the internet. The show is on its last legs at the new Gold art space, run by Serakai Studio.

Ozymandias featured several mix-and-match installations, created by juxtaposing distressed garments with a post-apocalyptic look designed by American actor, painter and fashion designer Greg Lauren and spectral portraits taken by turn-of-the-20th-century French artists — Eugène Carrière, Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, and Georges Dorignac. Fragmented heads and limbs from classical sculptures, sourced from ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as similar forms created by contemporary artists such as Urs Fischer, also figured.

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“It’s about a collision between two worlds,” says Sotheby’s Asia Chairman Nicolas Chow. “Clothing here is a second skin that carries memory and conflict instead of signaling beauty and status. It’s a discourse on the human body, human imperfections, and the tribulations of the human existence.”

Eugène Carrière’s Portrait de Femme served as the missing head on the mannequin torso clothed in Lauren’s charcoal tent sleeveless Brando with “spine” back — a nod to the leather motorcycle jacket look sported by American matinee idol Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953). The fabric for the piece is in fact recycled weather-beaten military tents. Chow describes the installation as emblematic of “the archaeology of the future”.

More examples of such retro-futuristic fashion included a distressed military parka repurposed into a piece vaguely resembling a formal dinner jacket by Lauren. It appeared to be in dialogue with a gargantuan bronze foot-shaped sculpture by Fischer. Together they conjured up the image of a solitary apocalypse survivor wandering across a barren hellscape and then stumbling on a relic from a previous civilization.

Falling online

Most of the pieces in Dreamedcore look back on the internet of the ’90s through a contemporary lens. Many of the 22 artists and designers participating in the exhibition, as well as curator Shirley Lau, belong to a generation that grew up watching the “constant transformation driven by urbanization and technology”.

Lau adds that the exhibition invites visitors to consider and reflect on the pivotal moments “when memory was turned into data, when art became an experience to be consumed, and when the virtual and the real got intertwined”.

The designs by Hong Kong fashion brand Yat Pit are an attempt to reimagine the city’s cultural codes. These include a sun hat with black mesh that brings to mind traditional Hakka hats, flared pants with dragon motifs, and corsets and dresses with chopsticks incorporated as a design element.

Shanghai-based fashion brand Penultimate introduced its Chinese Toy Story collection at the exhibition. Some of these are made by stitching together stuffed toys, and some come with cartoonish prints.

Brand founder Xiang Gao says that the designs on display are meant to be a critique of conspicuous consumption. For instance, the Emperor’s New Clothes set comprises a brocade hoodie and a cloak with a gauze finish. These pieces are displayed on a mannequin with a concealed face, alluding, perhaps, to the difference between a person and their online persona.

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Dreamedcore also features a couple of pieces referencing both Thai mythology and gay gym culture, created by Thai fashion brand IwannaBangkok. For instance, a mannequin wears a printed mini-dress and matching elephant head-shaped headpiece that could also be a piece of underwear worn upside down. The motifs on the dress show cartoon elephants in suggestive poses. This is a curious example of how sacred elements — the elephant is a revered entity in both Buddhist, and Hindu, mythology — can be satirized in contemporary culture.

If you go

Dreamedcore: art, design, fashion

Dates: Through Saturday

Venue: Gold, Remex Centre, 42 Wong Chuk Hang Road

www.serakai.studio/gold