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NOW HAS A THRIVING HOMEWARE BUSINESS AND IS LAUNCHING SELF-DESIGNED HOTELS AROUND THE WORLD. LUX EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Darius Sanai CATCHES UP WITH ANGELA MISSONI, CREATIVE DIRECTOR AND DRIVING FORCE OF THE BRAND, OVER COFFEE IN KNIGHTSBRIDGE

Angela Missoni

DS: What is the key to your longevity?
AM: I often ask myself the same question, I think it is a miracle. I think really it is because my parents invented the style. I was lucky enough to inherit style from them and was able to revamp it and make it fashionable again. Missoni was not only a zigzag and it isn’t only a zigzag. It is a style, a colour base, they were pioneer in many things in fashion. The palate of Missoni is vast in terms of patterns and colours, I’m not scared in adding to it.

I’m never working on the past, I always work on the future. I never go to archives. I know the archives by heart, I was there. Every reference in my mind of my youth and growing up is related to a pattern, to a dress, to a person, to something related to fashion. If ever I ask to see something from the archive I tell them the precise year and I know exactly what I am asking for.

How do you stop everything from slipping into the past and keep it moving forward?

I use my instinct, with my knowledge of the pattern. I don’t have a recipe, I work by instinct which luckily has worked till now. I think I have courage. I was asking myself “how can I be so sure of what I am doing?” but I’m not, anymore. I like things and I go on. Season after season, I follow my instincts. There is something which is a continuation. Every collection has a precise identity but the research work never stops. There is a continuation. Maybe someone from outside can analyse better.

You have this reputation for being an earth mother… I like to live in the country. I like to come out of the country of course, but I do like to come back. I started an organic chicken farm 30 years ago, maybe that’s where the reputation started. The two things can go together.

Do you ever try to combine them?
What fashion and the chicken farm? No! Fashion is fantasy, you try to work with natural material, there is a comfort that has to be there for me in our clothes which is part of something. Those clothes have to make you feel better, or at least I hope that they do. I don’t look at trends. Either you see them or you don’t and you filter. I think I have good eyes. I see details that the majority of people don’t see. In a good sense as well as a bad sense, as you see defects everywhere. I see that there is a plug under the couch over there. I see when it’s dirty and I want it to be clean. I am very curious and I try to see as much as I can in general and I am attracted by many different things, I analyse everything and I translate it into my work.

Your mother lost interest in fashion, which is part of the reason she passed the business over to you. How do you stay engaged and interested in it?

Bowl design for Target with the characteristic Missoni zigzag pattern

My mother felt trapped. When she asked me to do the main line, she was tired of fighting with the commercial side. As soon as she stepped out of it, she said she wanted to retire. She has many other interests in life, but then she started with the Missoni home collection. She still does research. If she goes to a flea market, she will bring me something back so she hasn’t lost her passion for fashion. At the time she felt alone, fighting the commercial side, and she said to me “fashion you have to do when you are young and passionate, and you have the strength to fight with the commercial side otherwise they will ask you to always do the same thing that they sold yesterday.”

What keeps you inspired?
Sometimes you finish a collection and you are very tired. You might not even have the time to finish one before you start on the next. Sometimes you don’t know where you are. A little thing is enough to start it. You might see a small thing that opens the door again and you can start the process to go on. Of course, that’s what keeps you going on. I don’t only design fashion, me and my brothers own the factory and the brand. It means you are involved in all the processes, you have various things that can keep your attention alive all the time. When I see that my clothes are well received, I do have a sense of satisfaction. It is good to see that you are on the right track, so that you can go on. When I see that my daughters enjoy my clothes too, they are also very inspiring. [Angela’s daughter Margarita is an A-list model and unofficial face of the brand].

What does the Missoni brand mean?

Three generations of the Missoni family

It is fashion, but I would like people to think of it as more than fashion. It is artisanal, craftsmanship and many values. It is a brand with a very long history so that’s what I was trying to communicate. Sometimes I can hardly distinguish the brand from the family. Doesn’t mean that we all eat together everyday or that I see my mum everyday, I might see her three days in a row. I do talk to my daughters very regularly. At the moment my daughter is getting married so I seem to talk to her every 30 minutes! She was in New York for five years and one day I told her that instead of her having a phone she should have an intercom from New York and here because we speak so often.

What would you like people to think when they think of Missoni?
First thing is I would like them to have a smile. Then think of something positive. They should think beauty, joie de vivre, a lift in the spirit. You can think of art, of good food, dinner with friends. Family is not only family members, it is a large sense of family which includes your friends. A sense of hospitality. It started with my father at the very beginning. The first collection that my father decided not to show in Florence (which was in Palazzo Pitti) because he realised why go there when there was an international airport 15 minutes from the house. That was how the Milan fashion week started. Others followed. They were not showing in Milan, they were showing in the factory. That is incredible when you think of it today, but in 1970-1971, all the fashion crowd was 150 people from magazines to Bloomingdales and buyers from Hong Kong. My mother was organising lunch and dinner for them too.

Angela Missoni design for the A/W 2012/13

What is the relationship between art and fashion for you?
Both subjects are the expression of the moment together with other forms, music and film, etc. I don’t think that fashion is an art but more of a craftsmanship. That’s what makes the link. We are talking the language of now or rather of tomorrow. Art also is an expression, an extract of what is now. This setting is the link.

With my work I just want my clothes to look beautiful, to give you something more. Art sometimes can be disturbing. I’m not going to make clothes that disturb you, so it isn’t the same process as art can be. I like the interaction with artists. More recently I have been asked by several artists if they can do a collaboration with us, which is very interesting. They want to work with us, with our materials. Last week I was asked by Nick Cave who I would love to work with. I would like to ask them what they think about Missoni. I wanted to work with Peter Blake, but I convinced Juergen Teller to have his photo cut out. No one touches a photo of Juergen Teller, but he let it happen. It was done at the Museum of Everything. We did a campaign inside the museum. For the summer campaign I put together Juergen Teller, Pedro Almodovar, Rossy de Palma. Everybody enjoyed it. Put creative talent together and shake. Artists are very much in their own world. Rarely you see them watching other artists. I had the image of Sergent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in my head and I wanted to have an image like that with all our family.

My projects, I have to work fast. If I am working for a campaign I need to work with a very fast rhythm. From the show to the day you have to have the material in your hand, you have a month, a month and a half. You can start thinking before but not much because the collection is really defined when it is on the catwalk.

We did a movie with Kenneth Anger two years ago. Sometimes you think people are very hard to approach but actually it is very simple. Kenneth came and stayed five days with us.

How does the fashion side relate to the home, the hotels?

Spool Tables

It relates because there are some patterns that can translate. What I like is that patterns in fashion stay there for 6 months or even less, but the same pattern you can put on an armchair and it has a life of 15 years. It gives you satisfaction. Certain patterns maybe are not instantly recognisable as Missoni, particularly from the outside, but they became Missoni classic designs.

You’re wearing some very cool accessories. Can you explain what they are for the benefit of our readers who can’t be here?
I always create my jewels myself. I don’t like to wear the things that other people wear. I do it instinctively. This is a souvenir chain with little presents, charms. It is a long chain from the beginning of the last century, I think it was meant for a monocle. I am wearing black trousers, black t-shirt, boots, and a sweater wrap. The earrings are the same. I was in Columbia at the end of the year and bought a little coffee grain from the airport, which I have hung on it too.

TIM ETCHELLS FOUNDED ART HONG KONG, WHICH HAS NOW BEEN TAKEN OVER BY ART BASEL AND IS THE LEADING ART FAIR IN ASIA. NOW HE’S LAUNCHING ANOTHER FAIR – IN LONDON, HOME OF FRIEZE. HE TELLS LUX WHY

What is Art13?

It is London’s global art fair. The capital has people from all over the world, living here, working here and appreciating art. The existing art fairs don’t cover everyone. London is a big city of 8 million odd people, it can certainly warrant another. We don’t want people to feel intimidated, it is a friendly fair. The gallery content is very much global; half of our stands are from 25 other countries outside the UK, from Korea, China, Australia, India, all over the world. Many have never shown here or if they have, it hasn’t been for a long time in an art fair, even many of the UK galleries.

Why is it different?

There are people out there who like art and are wealthy individuals and who feel that there isn’t an art fair in London they can relate to. The affordable art fair is about decorative art, filling a hole on the wall with a piece of art and probably not curated. Frieze is vetted and curated, but your average person who buys two or three pieces of art a year at a reasonable level is intimidated when they visit. They don’t feel relaxed. Its focus is a very serious art fair, the character and the atmosphere. Art13 will be a serious art fair, but a friendly art fair with a personality.

How do you make an art fair friendly?

We have employed an architect who is working on the theme, ‘All the Fun of the Art Fair.’ He works on interior design for restaurants and homes, most recently Adele’s house. He understands approachability. If you had an exhibition designer, they would create a design for an exhibition space, it would look like all the others. The prevalence of social media means the look of the place is even more important. You want your guests tweeting, bringing an audience there through the week. If it looks great, busy and a place you want to go, then people will come, word of mouth drives it.

Who do you want to attract?

Art fair audiences are a pyramid. At the top are the really serious art collectors, in the middle are the wealthy individuals who collect art and then the general public who just want a day out. We see all three sectors as equally important and feeling that they are welcome there; they can walk into a gallery and talk to the owner about the art. Maybe they won’t buy today, but they will buy tomorrow.

How did Art Hong Kong begin?

I first had the idea when I was in Australia. I was speaking to Australian galleries who told me they had been up in Hong Kong selling art by taking hotel rooms. It didn’t seem a very smart way to do it so when I heard they had no art fair I went up there. I had never been to Hong Kong before, but I realised there was a gap and decided we should do an art fair. Hong Kong is a hub, Asia is growing, the pieces of the product slotted together

How difficult was it to establish it?

People were very sceptical. We got into month three or four of the project and I said “at what point should we pull it, do we have a fair?” because we were struggling to get galleries in. Magnus Renfrew, the Fair’s Director, just kept on pushing; he had a real vision about how he wanted the fair to be. In the first year the gallery year was almost there, not exactly what we wanted, but it was good enough to build the fair on.

We were determined never to do a deal with any galleries. There is a real temptation to do that, especially with a new art fair, but it can be the kiss of death. If the galleries you give spaces to pull out, it sends the wrong message to others. In London there are still some galleries we would like to be in it, but at the moment it is a good enough base so that the galleries that we want to be there are interested in participating.

Is it easy to set up an art fair?

It has become tougher, probably because of global competition. People look at any fair from a global perspective. A gallery will decide whether they want to show in Rio or Miami now, where as before they would be much more local. It really is about getting your positioning right. It isn’t just about the message of the fair, but also about where and when. We deliberately chose February because we go through the terrible January period, then in February the flowers start to come out, London Fashion Week and the BAFTAs appear, the Oscars start coming and people are looking for things to do. We chose West London because of the wealth around there. If you get those bits right, you can make a great fair.

Have art fairs changed the art scene?

It has changed how galleries sell their art. You look at the sales mix now and they sell it through the gallery, through their website and through the art fairs. If you look at any serious gallery, they will all have at least one or two art fairs in their year. They bring out a different audience they often can’t access any other way. Art fairs are important for the audience too. I have never seen someone unhappy at an art fair. I went to Fiac in Paris in the Grand Palais, it’s stunning. How could you not enjoy that?

What are your concerns?

The concern of anyone running these events is that you want both sides to do business. You want the visitor to enjoy it and buy art and the galleries to sell, either that day in the fair or later on, when people visit their gallery.

I have no problem bowling up to a visitor in the art fair to see what they think. 9 times out of 10 people will tell you and you get an honest answer. Most of my lot are terrified of it, but I love it, that’s how you learn. They will tell you little things, the negatives so that you can react to them.

How did you become involved in running events?

30 years ago I was a photocopy salesman; to this day I have no idea how a photocopier works. I found selling boxes that copy things boring so I changed job to work as a salesman for an events company. I worked my way up and after 8 or 9 years asked the owner if I could ever buy a stake in the business. When he said no, I left to join a new company and started ‘The Money Shows’. We built them up and sold them on which is how it all started.

Have you had any particularly difficult events?

I decided to launch The Clothes Show in London and linked it to Cosmopolitan. The deal was that they lent their brand and I funded the show. We persuaded the companies we worked with on London Fashion Week to take a stall alongside some cool cosmetics companies and held it in Earl’s Court. We got an audience, but they were all kids, 16 year olds with no money, not the 25 year old readership Cosmo described. Normally with fairs, you expect to lose in the first year, make back the loss in the second year and make profit in the third, but with that show, you could never make it back again. Cosmo wanted me to do it again, but I walked away with a half a million pound loss.

Do you always invest your own money?

Yes, always. The art fairs are more challenging than any. You have massive staff costs, over heads, venue costs, promotion costs and you don’t get a penny in for months and months. The art fair at the moment, I doubt we have had £5000 in income.

Do you enjoy the risk?

The house isn’t on the line, but I do enjoy the risk. Like anyone who invests in something I’m always aware that I have to put more in, so you don’t have the painful moment of trying to find that money from somewhere.

What is it that you still love about running these shows?

The satisfaction of seeing it come together. Some shows are nightmares, you nearly pull them, you can’t sell the stands. The buzz that you get at the end of the second day – if you have a strong start it generally follows through – when everyone is happy is great. As a business man, when you have a successful event, you know that is something you can build on. That’s a really nice feeling.

What are you most proud of?

Probably Art HK. I had never done a high end art fair and I had never been to Hong Kong. To create something that Art Basel buys 70% of and be considered in the premier league of art fairs is phenomenal.

Do you collect art?

Bits and bobs. I buy a lot of Australian art because it is colourful, it’s clever and it’s quite good value and I have some Warhols. I quite like pop art because I was brought up in the 60s and 70s. I bought my first Wahol in the late 80s in New York just after I had done a deal. I said to the guy in the gallery “I really like this painting. He’s not making them like this anymore is he?” and he replied “no, that’s because he has been dead 10 years.” So really, I didn’t know anything about art!

Art13 London, 1-3 March, 2013, artfairslondon.com Interview by Caroline Davies

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MARCEL WANDERS IS ONE OF A HANDFUL OF DESIGNERS WHO HAVE  REWRITTEN THE RULES OF THE GAME IN THE PAST TWENTY YEARS. Caroline Davies GETS UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH HIM

Marcel Wanders is such a design legend that a number of design-savvy colleagues were convinced he is dead, gone with fellow-countryman Bauhaus pioneers like Mies van der Rohe. But he is not dead. In fact, he is very much alive, sitting in front of me, describing the occasion when he ran naked across a conference stage in New York, throwing
sweets into the audience.

The rebel of staid Dutch design schools, Wanders has been creating his own unique strand of work since the 1990s. Relying on an offbeat aesthetic intelligence and a determination with the horsepower of a super yacht, he charged into the
design world with his own ethos; imaginative, bizarre and full on. His designs are everywhere. At 30,000 feet with his British Airways collaboration, in your back pocket on your ACME pen or at The MOMA in New York who proudly display his “knotted chair” as part of their permanent collection. The success and influence of his conceptual designs have permeated around the world; it is easy to forget that he is not yet 50.

On first meeting, Wanders appears surprisingly conservative. Upright and composed, with a cow lick flop of silver grey hair and designer stubble, a crisp white shirt and well cut suit, the only unusual feature about his appearance is a string of coloured beads and stones, lying neatly across the top of the small triangle of revealed chest. They are, I discover later, representations of different parts of his life, collected for their interesting back story; lava, meteorite, birthstones, Viagra. Not brash, but perhaps a little playfully subversive. Not unlike his designs.

His vase based on a mould of a condom filled with hard boiled eggs. The image of a half fish, half spoon decorating a hotel wall. His airborne snotty vases, a scan of small section of mucus in flight from a sneeze. No one quite designs like Wanders. Few are as conspicuous as him either.

“I want design to be more humanistic,” he says. “More human, more personal. If you think you can hide behind the rational you are not making humanistic things. I sign off my work, because I am human. It is not the best in the world, but they are my mistakes. If I want to do this then I think I should show my face, who I am.”

Who he is does seem closely linked to Wanders’ work. Expelled from his first design school, the Design Academy Eindhoven for “thinking outside the box”, Wanders graduated from the Institute of the Arts Arnhem in the late 80s. He joined Dutch design brand Droog, created his “knotted chair” and began to establish a reputation for fun, innovative design. Today he is the co-owner and artistic director of design company Moooi, although perhaps his most prevalent body of work is that created for his host of eclectic collaborations, from hotels in Miami to Marks Spencer’s, Puma to Mac, projects spanning the globe.

“I am very disappointed about my ability to change the world,” he says, with a small laugh. “But I think something has changed in design. When I started, it was cold, mathematical, noncommunicative, non-human, technocratic, cold, clean, whatever. Today it is more romantic, more beautiful, more communicative and a lot more important as it reaches way more people.”

Disparaging as he may seem about the past, Wander’s also has a respect for it too.

“In today’s design we create children without parents, which I think is a very cynical approach to life,” he says. “If we have more respect for the past we can make things today that still have meaning tomorrow.

“If we want to create a sustainable life, we need to change. We have to forget that new is better than old. It is our responsibility – it is my responsibility to change things.”

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Olivo Barbieri creates artifice out of reality. The Italian art photographer and film-maker, who has shown at MOMA New York, the Sundance Festival and Tate Modern in London, specialises in visual studies of spectacular urban landscapes that make cities look like haunting plastic architects’ maquettes. In an exclusive interview with Caroline Davies, he talks of his adventures in India, China, and London’s Olympic Park.

How do you start on a project?
There is no rule, it depends on the project. Each is different. I use some inspiration from books or the Internet. Because I use a helicopter, I will speak to the pilot to decide what to do. Much of the time I have a selection of places in mind but whether we can reach these often depends on the city I am in. London is easier because you can get permission to shoot.

How do you select your subjects?
That is a difficult question to answer. I try a lot of subjects and I don’t know before I shoot them what will happen. It is difficult to explain. Sometimes something interests me. When I was shooting London it was very important for me to see the new Olympic area and some new construction.

The subject has to be right for my work, not everything belongs with it. When I select my images I try to tell a story, like a small novel. Normally I decide to have only 12 images that relate to one another. I will shoot more or less 2000 images before I select and when I start, I don’t know what will be. The first step in the project is when I shoot, but the second is in post-production.

The really famous landmarks are more difficult because they are well-known subjects, St Paul’s or Tower Bridge for example. There are so many images in the history of photography that it is difficult to do something new. That is part of the challenge of my work.

What do you want to achieve?
I want to capture a city in a new way, but also discover what will be the future of this city; I’m always experimenting. The important thing is to imagine how it will be in the future, not how it is now. I choose something major so that people will look at the picture and see the possibility. I am looking for what will be.

Do you remember your first camera?
Yes it was an Eura Ferrania, an Italian – made camera. I was 8 years old. I still have some photographs and the camera, it still works. It is very simple. I liked it a lot, but I only started taking photographs seriously when I was 18. I wanted to be a photographer, but create art photography, not commercial photography, and have my work in a gallery. I looked at work of Monet and Andy Warhol.

How did you start your career?
At the beginning I did straight photography. I shot in the outskirts of cities, often at night because I was interested the artificial illumination of the city. I took pictures of Europe and Asia and made a comparison between the way each uses artificial illumination. After that I started to use select focus where only part of the lens is in focus so it was possible to decide what the more important part is. I built a project in Italy, India and in China and I did a big exhibition. In 2003 I started shooting famous cities of the world from a helicopter. The plan was quite specific, I tried to look at the world like an installation.

The selected focus technique is very interesting. I started using it because I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography, I wanted to decide what part of the picture was interesting. I discovered that not only was it possible to decide important to me because no one had done that before. Then I made a discovery when I tried to do it from a helicopter. When what was to be the central focus, but the result was something like a new world, a new way to see the world. It was very I first used it, I was very surprised, it opened a new world of possibility. It was very interesting to me that everything could be made to look like this, less real. I tend to decide after whether something has worked or not.

What do you think of the camera phone?
I like it a lot. When everyone has a camera, they can take a normal photo around me so it allows me to focus on art photography, to take a photo of something that they cannot. It gives me more freedom

The second floor will house the permanent exhibition

SIR TERENCE CONRAN IS A MAN WHO CHANGED THE WAY THE WORLD THINKS ABOUT DESIGN. AND HE WANTS TO DO IT AGAIN.Caroline Davies HEARS HIS SAGE WORDS AT THE UNVEILING OF LONDON’S SPECTACULAR NEW DESIGN MUSEUM PROJECT

Terence Conran’s influence on design and culture is astonishing. An independent designer from the age of 21, in 60 years Conran and his work have affected the way we shop, decorate, eat and live, but he is still working to leave his mark.

Conran is as active as he has ever been during the past six decades, and his latest project is, he says, one of the most exciting yet. “This to me is really one of the most fantastic days of my rather long life,” he says. “We have the next three years to fulfil our ambition to make this the very best design museum in the world,” he says. “Every city wants a design museum it seems these days, but this is where creative Britain should lead.”

Sir Terrence Conracn

He is speaking at the groundbreaking of Britain’s spectacular new Design Museum, which will be an institution that showcases every type of design from around the world. It will be located on the site of the former Commonwealth Institute in one of London’s wealthiest areas, replacing the boutique site occupied by the current Design Museum.

There are few individuals better placed to lead the project. He is a “serial entrepreneur” whose career has seen him build and establish an architectural practice, a design company and a series of restaurants. Habitat, his furniture store that brought sharply designed furniture to the masses, was the first to introduce Britain to sharp contemporary design with wit and genuine creativity. Wondering how the average CEO’s office morphed from dark oak panels and antiques to minimalist whites, glass and an Alessandro Mendini chair? Conran’s influence influenced those who changed the world.

His first restaurant, “Soup Kitchen” was just the second spot in London to boast an espresso machine and his subsequent projects have been credited with popularising fine dining in the UK: his designs made him a restaurant king in the 1990s. And before that his designs for Mary Quant’s stores altered all expectations for the shop floor.  Although Conran’s main projects have been in the UK, his mission to deformalize design and make creativity available to every stratum of society have had a profound effect on every element of design around the world.  Spurred on by his belief that good design should be democratised and celebrated, he founded the Design Museum, firstly in the Victoria and Albert Museum then in its current location in Bermondsey, South London. Gaining credibility and more crucially funding for the project was not an easy process and Conran semi-affectionately refers to the period as their, “guerrilla time in the absolutely terrible old boiler house.”

The museum will be located in the former Commonwealth Institute
on Kensington High Street

“Getting this particular site was absolutely brilliant,” says Conran. “It is a very important symbol and marker.  Here we have this building from the 1960s an extraordinary structure, sadly sat here for the last 12 years unused.” Soon to be part of the museum hub of Kensington, joining the V&A and the Royal College and Imperial College, the museum is due for completion in 2014.  Despite his passion and ongoing energy for design, Conran does not seem quite as robust as he once was. In his usual blue suit with red cheeks, he moves slowly and rather gingerly, hunched over the microphone, carefully stating his message. His increasing years seem to make him even more determined that the public, and crucially the government, should listen.

The plan for London’s new Design Museum

“We must start to make things again,” he says determinedly. “If you can put designers together with entrepreneurs together with engineers we can make beautiful and useful things again in this country that the world will want. I think it just needs a push from government to make this new collaboration of entrepreneurs, designers, engineers to start another industrial revolution.”

The distant beep of an articulated lorry begins in the background.

“I hope government sees it and sees that construction is underway,” says Conran, smiling. “We are going to make a rather large hole.”

Presentation is an important part of any dining experience, but can the look of the dish really make or break a meal? STACEY TEO
We’ve all heard the expression “you eat with your eyes”, but how true is it? What importance do aesthetics really have on ones’ enjoyment of a meal? It wasn’t until the advent of nouvelle cuisine that food presentation began to take on the importance it holds today. It was an exhilarating time for the culinary world with never-before-seen creations coming one after another. Plating-up became an industry buzz word and the dish suddenly offered an empty canvas which chefs used to create their own personal form of gastro-art.

In the early days Paul Bocuse, Michel Guerard and the Troisgros brothers not only lightened up traditional French cooking, they also paved the way for the kind of sculpted dishes we see today. Presentation was an exciting new tool that allowed chefs to put their signatures on their dishes. But now, fifty years down the line, nouvelle is no longer new and a lot of what we see is either a copy of a copy, extremely overthought or downright silly looking.

Checking out how the food looks is the cook’s last task and the diner’s first. Food that is well-presented makes the diner want to eat it and allows them to identify the ingredients and their quality while poor presentation gives a bad first impression and means you face an uphill struggle to win over the client. The Japanese, as with so many other things, have turned food presentation into a high art. They even have a word, Moritsuke, which applies to seven very specific rules of food arrangement.

Personally I think presentation counts for about 30 per cent of the experience, the other 70 per cent of course is taste, but I have colleagues that would argue for a 50/50 split. To me one of the most important aspects of plate presentation is what it represents. Whether you are dining out or entertaining at home, presentation attests to the artistic nature of the experience, the effort behind the meal and helps set it apart from an everyday experience. This kind of attention to detail indicates that you value your guests enough to go to the trouble to try and achieve something beyond the mundane, it shows you care and that they are important to you.

As long as a dish is presentable then I’m happy with it. Don’t get me wrong, by that I mean it must look clean and simple with fresh, inviting colours and it should never look messy. I also follow the rule that everything on the plate should be there for a reason and that everything should be edible. I think the biggest mistake chefs make is to try too hard to impress with the presentation. It often makes the dish look pretentious and means they are focussing too much of their attention on aesthetics which normally is not something that makes or breaks a meal.

Pierre Gagnaire’s shrimp with gaya and popcorn

As a colleague of mine, Michelin-starred chef Marc Fosh says, “Food should look as natural as possible and every element should be there only if it serves to enhance the flavour of the dish. I hate inedible garnishes and towers of food that collapse and then look like a mess when touched by a fork. I know I have it right when the food looks like it was born on the plate. Of course presentation is important, but at the end of the day, it is the flavour that will bring clients back time and again.”

True, no matter how beautiful it looks, if the flavour is wrong nothing else matters. We are not making sculptures only to be admired. Eventually the client is going to taste the food, they always do, and then nothing that came before really matters.

I have been asked many times if I ever studied food design. Many culinary schools teach specialised courses in food presentation but I have always felt that they are nice but unnecessary for a chef. The most important thing is that the ingredients themselves look as good as possible.

To achieve this takes a skilled hand in the kitchen. Cooking temperatures and timing are key. For example when blanching vegetables, the water must be exactly 100 degrees Celsius, you have to add a dash of salt and then immediately run them through ice water. A good chef knows that not following these steps will mean colourless and unappetising vegetables. Likewise, overcooked ingredients not only lose their flavour but also their natural shape and colour too. Once that happens, no matter how you sculpt it, your dish will look as bland and uninteresting as it tastes. So although you may eat with your eyes, it is the cook’s hands that truly make or break the dish. My advice then, perfect your cooking techniques and the food will present itself.

A green sanctuary at the edge of Thailand’s oldest rainforest offers the eco-conscious a place to feel good about feeling good

With the opening of Thanyamundra Organic Resort, Thailand’s interior just got a little greener. Sitting at the edge of the Khao Sok National Park in the rolling hills of southern Thailand’s, Thanyamundra is a luxurious retreat that not only pampers its guests but the environment as well.

The nine-suite resort is housed in two golden, teak villas each decorated with a collection of Asian antiques. Inside there is a restaurant serving Thai cuisine and a spa offering traditional Thai herbal and aroma oil massages. Outside there is an infinity pool from which the land falls away to the terraces of the organic farm and beyond to a thick green wall of vegetation that announces the beginning of what appears to be an impenetrable forest.

It is the farm that makes Thanyamundra so unique. It is the heart and soul of the resort. On this lush, 25-acre lot, Thanyamundra organically grows 51 different types of fruits, vegetables and spices including everything from mangoes and pak choy to lemongrass, onions, pumpkins, three types of beans and four different types of rice.

When harvested this means that up to 70 percent of the ingredients used in the meals served at Thanyamundra come from the farm. Anything that is not used in the kitchen is sold online through Pura Organic. Furthermore, before any food spoils it is dried or dehydrated and fruits like bananas and mangoes are used for jam or ice cream and sorbets. Any discarded cuttings or waste is added to the compost to produce the natural fertilizers used on the farm. Even the dining menus are written up on large leaves from the garden as a way of saving paper. How’s that for eco-conscious?

The greening of Thanyamundra doesn’t end in the kitchen. The resort has taken numerous steps to reduce its carbon footprint to a bare minimum. Look around your suite and you won’t find any plastics other than the water bottles and even those are recycled once used and all amenities, cleaning products and even the mosquito spray are environmentally friendly.

On the grounds, guests move about in rechargeable electric buggies and the 50-metre lap pool uses an ozonater filtration system that naturally keeps the pool clean and reduces the amount of chlorine used.

Thanyamundra’s eco-efforts have now moved beyond the borders of its property. The resort has just teamed up with naturalist Thom Henley, author of the definitive tome on Khao Sok, Waterfalls and Gibbon Calls to blaze new trails into the heart of the park. Thailand’s biggest national park with forests dating back 160 million years, older than even the Amazon, Khao Sok is home to an incredible range of animals including wild elephants, tigers, leopards, Malayan sun bears, Asiatic black bears, barking deer, long tailed macaques, 46 species of snakes and almost 200 species of birds.

Helping guests take it all in, a series of walks has just been developed by Henley, who, when in residence, will actually conduct guided walking tours himself. According to Thanyamundra General Manager Shaun Dunhofen it is an opportunity to learn about and truly understand a part of Thailand few ever get a chance to visit. “Mr Henley is a walking encyclopaedia on Khao Sok and his passion is infectious,” says Dunhofen. “The trail walks he has developed offer a truly unique experience. I’ve done some of the walks myself and I can say that I’ve never been in a forest that teemed with such a profusion of wildlife.”

When he is not at Thanyamundra, tours will be conducted by park rangers trained by Henley. “As upscale tourism grows, there will be more jobs available for locals, either as guides or related jobs,” says Henley. “I’m very proud of our lead guide and his son, Mr Nit and You Chanyoo. Nit is a key part of the story, for his life encapsulates everything we are trying to do.”

It’s an inspiring story. Before teaming up with Thanyamundra, Nit supported his family by poaching. Like many of the other local farm boys,he poached to supplement his income – even though his mother was always against it. One day while out on a poaching run, he came across a wild elephant mother and baby and something happened. For a reason Nit himself can’t explain, his mother’s words came to him and he just couldn’t pull the trigger. Now he is not only one of the park’s most respected guides but he visits local schools teaching children about conservation. It is the combination of all these efforts that will help ensure the survival of this very special place for another 160 million years.

thanyamundra.com

Tracy Emin, the wildest young British artist to have shot to fame after the Royal Academy’s Seminal Sensation exhibition 15 years ago, has calmed down and gone home to the seaside town of Margate. Or has she? Caroline Davies caught up with her at the Turner Contemporary

Tracey Emin in Margate

The exhibition includes new and existing drawings, monoprints, sculptures and neons

On an icy bright British day, a column of deliberately scruffy DFLs – that’s local shorthand for Down From Londoners – marches deliberately out of Margate station along the grey promenade of this faded English seaside resort. It snakes past the empty, half lit amusement arcades, the shell sculpture decorated tea shops, the tanning salons, the bucket and spades and the few Margate locals on the street at midmorning who turn to give each other a knowing glance. The DFLs are not interested in the superannuated charms of Margate: they are heading towards the angular cement modern building sitting on the edge of the sea wall, The Turner Contemporary, to see the works of Britain’s most famous female artistic talent. They are here to see Tracey Emin.

The show is Emin’s first major exhibition in her home town

A view of the installation, She Lay Down Beneath the Sea

Emin is waiting in the gallery on the day I visit. Although this is a return to her hometown, in many ways, Emin never really left here. Works inspired by the town pepper her shows and anecdotes about her upbringing slot their way into almost every interview to explain her pieces, her behaviour.

“You can take the girl out of Margate,” Emin once remarked with her infamous grin. “But you can’t take Margate out of the girl.”

When The Turner Contemporary first opened in April 2011, Emin was one of the first on the scene, visibly emotional as she took a turn around the cavernous space, a trail of press at her heels.

“I never imagined such a beautiful building, an art gallery where I grew up,” Emin said at the time. “Margate’s lost 20 years, it’s been quite run down, but I think this will make a big difference. It’s fantastic, it’s beautiful.” Emin’s arrival on the day I visit for the opening of her exhibition ‘She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea’ is greeted with a gentle hush and rapid cannon of turning heads. She needs no announcement; she has everyone’s silent attention. “Welcome to Margate,” she beams. There is something of a swagger about Emin; her confident stride and her asymmetrical smile are surprisingly recognisable. Her voice is light and high, and speaking to Emin, you first are struck by her directness. She knows what she is saying and why she is here. And it isn’t only about the art.

Sex 1

“This is a shift in my work,” she says, looking confident if a little self conscious. “Something has happened in the last year because I am nearly 50. I am looking at art in a new way and trying to understand what it is that made me an artist, what it is that I love about art.”

The show features several images of beds, the first a series of blue painted images of Emin’s bed, her window and her chest of drawers and later a cast bronze branch lying in the centre of a stained mattress. The mattress was Emin’s, put in her studio after three years of use, the stains made without conscious effort.

“I’m not going to go into the gory details. Believe me, it was all naturally made,” Emin says. “It wasn’t all on my own, I can assure you. It goes back to that thing of being over. It’s over. This explains it very well. It was there, but it’s gone.”

Emin is particularly clear on this point, stern even.

“The girl is gone, she’s never coming back,” she says adamantly and perhaps a little proactively.

Emin has the habit of speaking quickly and determinedly, particularly when discussing her work. It is as though she is worried someone will criticise her before she is finished, interrupting her explanation. However, as soon as the topic of Margate springs up, Emin’s tone softens.

“You’re seeing Margate at its absolute best,” she says, smiling. “Maybe not at it’s most romantic. It’s most romantic when you have thirty foot waves crashing over the sea wall. That’s quite something.”

“That is why Turner loved being here, not just for the beautiful sunsets, but for the storms and the craziness. I always say to people who want to visit the UK, don’t go to Brighton, go to Margate, it’s really dirty. It has a real edge to it.”

Her passion for her home town seems inalienably twisted with a sense of responsibility.

“I’m always anxious with a show, but more so with thisone,” she says. “I’ve been tearing myself to pieces.”

Turner was designed by Stirling Prize Winner David Chipperfield Architects

“After my Hayward show last year I thought ‘there’s no way I can do some sort of retrospective or survey show, I have to do something completely new’ for two reasons,” she says. “One I owe it to Margate for all that Margate has given me and the other reason is 92,000 people went to see my show at the Hayward. On days like this, I want the beach to be full, I want people swimming. I want Margate to be celebrated again.”

For Emin is an artist perhaps as misconstrued as her home town. She became a household name after the installation ‘Every Man I Have Ever Slept With’ was shown at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in the summer of 1997; yet she is a sublime draughtswoman, as any examination of her drawings will reveal. An old-fashioned artist at heart, from an old-fashioned seaside town?

“There is a possibility that with this show and with this gallery more people will come to visit than ever. Art can change things. There is a lot riding on it, not just for me but for what art can do. I don’t mean it in an ego way, I could be anyone sitting here saying that, but it is an effect that art can have and it should be positive.”

Emin’s exhibition lasted only through the summer; so is one of Britain’s truly gritty seaside towns worth a visit? “Even if people don’t like my work I still think they should use it as an excuse to come down,” says the artist with her off-centre, tight-lipped grin. “Even if you come down and slag me off, I don’t care, just come.”

turnercontemporary.org

Championed by the influential alternative gallery Beijing Commune, Huang Yuxing is one of China’s artistic stars. Here he speaks to LUX about art, life, and everything.

Born in Beijing in 1975, Huang Yuxing graduated from The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2000. Brought up during China’s meteoric rise to the world’s largest economy, Yuxing’s work have been described as “highly political” although they do not feature humans. Instead, Yuxing’s pieces contain brightly coloured geometric patterns, originally inspired by everyday structures, deconstructed.

“What you feel from my works is my disturbance about the future,” says Yuxing about his pieces. “In my growing years, many good things around me disappeared, but new ones will appear anyway. The future is difficult to predict but it remains, it is still there even if the whole world was destructed.”

“Yuxing is from a new generation of artists that have been brought up in the period when the country has gradually steered itself from political fever to economic development,” says Lu Jingjing, director of Beijing Commune, the gallery representing Yuxing. “In a sense, they experience the influence of ideology in a much different way from the predecessors.”

“His work first attracted me with the tension he created. I think you feel the power the moment you stand in front of a Huang Yuxing painting.”

Yuxing has produced an extensive body of work with a variety of focuses. His “Diary” series touched upon different issues from internet suicide to a bird’s eye view of Hainan Island, all painted on keyhole shaped boards, intended to make the audience into peeping toms. His 2007 work, “When I need Love” saw the artist paint directly on to Ikea clocks, depicting physical brutality, recreation and loneliness, drawn together by the regular tick of the mechanisms.

“My works, which concern now will be a thing of the past. They are presented to the audiences honestly, with no sense of mystery. For me, the shapes attached with colours and feelings in my works, presented deeply, touch hearts. The mystery you feel is from the incomplete perception of the truth, but it would interest you to get into the truth which makes my works more attractive.”

Yuxing insists that he does not intend to intimidate his audience.

“If you can feel that, it means this quality lives in your heart already,” he says. “My work just brings it out.”

The final frontier Our columnist is a pioneer, an artist who left New York in 1994 to travel to China and establish himself as an artist, curator and commentator on the burgeoning contemporary art scene. From his unique standpoint, he outlines for LUX his views on Chinese contemporary art and its future directions MATHIEU BOYRSEVICZ

I went to China in 1994 as an artist, to get out of NYC and find some inspiration. I was oblivious to what I might find there. I was enamoured by the spirit of the scene and the intensity of the terrain. Then, there was no support system for the artists, and outright intolerance from the authorities.

There was no market or history of contemporary art, but there was a socio-cultural precedent and an impassioned will. This renegade, almost idealistic approach to art dazzled me and was something I felt artists in NYC seemed to have lost a long time ago.

There were no real venues for contemporary art; you had to seek it out, mainly in the artists’ homes. The direct contact with the work, people and stories gave me tremendous insight. The changes that have happened since then are parallel to those of the country itself. China’s art market is the second largest in the world. In the summer of 1998 there was only the recent, awkward, birth of one gallery in Beijing and one in Shanghai. Now there are tens of thousands of galleries.

The economic aspect is only one side. The change in attitude from the officialdom is astonishing. Now all the major academies train ‘contemporary artists’ and the government has sanctioned places like 798 in Beijing as ‘cultural zones’ and official tourist destinations. There are initiatives across the country, by both public and private sectors, to establish ‘world-class’ art museums. The Ministry of Culture has even established an Experimental Art Committee, served by some of China’s most important avantgarde artists.

Then there is the case of the Chinese artists on the international circuit. In the late 90s and early 2000s most of the [Western] art world politely rolled their eyes and dismissed Chinese art as another perestroika-like phenomenon. Now the most prominent galleries in the world – Gagosian, Pace, and White Cube just to mention a few – all have Chinese artists in their stable. Major Western museums are not only exhibiting contemporary art from China, but are systematically collecting it as well.

Up until the late 1990s, the market for Chinese art was mainly an export one; made in China, consumed in the West. China offered something sexy to Western dealers and curators – the rebel, the revolutionary, working against the system, moreover a communist system.

Chinese contemporary art also evolved with multicultural and post-colonial theory in the West. It made a perfect ‘other’, an Orientalist’s feast. In many people’s minds this export dynamic also impacted the nature of the work.

Westerners established the market. In the early 2000s it finally became apparent to the Chinese government and private sector that contemporary art had serious market value. The Chinese themselves got involved and the ante was raised – prices shot up, galleries and private museums opened and the system blossomed.

I’ve had the pleasure of watching some artists evolve and others sadly retrogress. I recently launched Xu Bing’s new Book from the Ground project in China and watching this artist’s evolution has been nothing short of astounding. Xu’s ability to retain his commitment to and concentration on many multi-faceted, long-term projects simultaneously, along with serving as vice dean to the Central Academy of Fine Arts is truly astonishing.

Liu Wei (the younger) is somebody who I thought in the 1990s was just following trends and would eventually fade away, but over the last few years he has become a firestorm of truly awesome production. Zhang Huan is also someone who has gone through multiple periods of metamorphosis, each one begetting the next.

Yang Fudong never ceases to amaze. Just when you think he’s repeating himself he delves a little deeper, pushes the bar further and dazzles. Ding Yi is interesting for the complete opposite reasonbecause he does nothing but repeat himself like a wise monk murmuring his mantra.

No matter what one thinks of Ai Weiwei’s tactics and the spectacle surrounding him his ability to stand up for his beliefs is truly anomalous in China. He is one of the few citizens, and certainly one of the only artists, to make his revulsion to injustice a brilliant art and effective protest. Xu Bing is another big inspiration. He approaches his artworks as a scientist might approach research. His explorations are almost like a lifelong unthreading of our global cultural spindles.

In terms of new young artists, Gao Weigang came out of nowhere a few years ago with a very mature body of work and has been coming on with full force ever since. Gao is a conceptual artist that oscillates between many different mediums with such ease, confidence and understanding of his materials, while at the same time retaining a consistent language, subdued sense of poetry, humour and temper.

Xu Zhen is the Chinese art world’s jester. Both his early work and reincarnation as ‘Made In Company’ (a collective of which Xu is the director) are not only hyper-imaginative (think the Cookie Monster surfing the internet on acid) and rich with humour but also poignant in their take on global politics.

Ouyang Chun, Lee Kit, Zhao Yao, Liao Guohe, Lu Yang, Zhang Lehua, Lin Zhipeng are all other exciting young artists to look out for. Unlike Western artists who get into art as a way to express themselves – meaning the existential angst of being alive – much contemporary Chinese art has, up to this point, been more focussed on the bigger socio-political picture. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but many artists are now looking at themselves, the personal, psychosomatic terrain of their daily lives.

Chinese contemporary art is a by-product of globalization. The history of contemporary art in China started in the late 1970s when China opened up its economy to the outside world; financial investment, literature, film, art, and culture also poured in.

On the other hand we now see a very homogenized approach to the arts, especially with artists born after 1980. They have had a different socio-economic experience than previous generations; many have studied abroad, are socialmedia crazed, drink Starbucks. Much of their work looks like it could’ve been made anywhere in the world. This, perhaps inevitable, situation evens the playing field but at the same time makes things less diverse. The current debate for artists and the creative industries in China is how to be contemporary while still being Chinese.

The Chinese economy is facing one of the toughest times in recent years but this leaves the 1%, the biggest consumers of art, largely unaffected. Those with money in China don’t have many investment options; the real estate market and stock market are bust. There was a bubble growing; maybe it hasn’t burst completely but it’s deflated. Yesterday I ran into an artist who was recently evicted from his 798 studio and returned to working at home. He said “I feel like we’re going back to early 2000 days… but it’s a good thing!” The cycles help to clean things up a bit, weed out the weaklings, and hopefully reinvigorate the art.

Mathieu Boyrsevicz is a curator and art advisor based in Shanghai and New York. Latterly Director of Shanghai Gallery of Art, he opens his own gallery space in China this autumn.

mabz.net