Wallflower Dispatches

Helen Lee (Li Hongyan in Chinese) is one of China’s foremost designers in the country’s emerging fashion scene.
She trained at Shanghai’s Donghua University and LaSalle College in Montreal. Formerly known as the East-China Textile Institute of Science and Technology, Donghua University is famous for training many fashion designers.
Having launched a successful denim brand in [...]

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It seems appropriate that Axel Klausmeier’s office overlooks one of the most famous former crossing points of the Berlin Wall in central Berlin in Bernauer Strasse. In the 28 year history of the Wall, this section is perhaps the most symbolic and emotional.
It was here that mass escapes took place. Iconic photographs such as the [...]

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The next time you are loitering outside the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly in London, ignore the big names exhibiting at Burlington House and instead look out for a small colourful painting in the road. It is the work of artist Ben Wilson, who over the past five years has painted around 10,000 pieces [...]

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Lena Proudlock was a model and knitwear entrepeneur before she became the “Queen of Denim”. Whether designing furniture, houses, running a boutique hotel or being a photographer, for Proudlock creativity is always fun.

Lena, I read somewhere that you used to be a model and worked with Helmut Newton. What was that like?
I was born in [...]

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Mick Rooney is a British painter who lives and works in London. He was elected Royal Academician in 1991. His painting, Shangri-La was a recent Royal Academy Object of the Month.
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is held every June, July and August in Piccadilly in Central London. It is an open exhibition and has been [...]

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Amid the general debates about downtown issues Bob Townley, Executive Director of Manhattan Youth keeps his eyes firmly focused on the one group of people that’s most important to him: the children and teenagers of lower Manhattan. Founded in 1986, Manhattan Youth is a non-profit group that runs youth programmes and after-school activities for [...]

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Andreas Düllick talks fast, clear and precisely. In the same time spent interviewing other people, he manages to say an average of 400 words more. Perhaps it’s the urgency of the situation that pushes him to provide as much information as he can possibly squeeze in.
Düllick is the editor of Strassenfeger, a bi-weekly magazine sold [...]

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We don’t know what the new downtown skyline will look like. But we do know it will contain a memorial. According to one dictionary a memorial is ‘something that keeps remembrance of persons or events alive’. It is Anita Contini’s task to project manage the process of creating that ‘something’. The words she uses most [...]

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In November 2007, Garrett Lisi published “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything”, a theory that attempts to describe all fundamental interactions that physicists have observed in nature, unifying general relativity with the standard model of particle physics. A self-confessed adventure sports fanatic, Lisi now lives and works in Maui, Hawaii, dividing his time between physics [...]

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What do you do with an 18 metre long corridor that’s dead space? Julie August converted part of her Berlin apartment into a gallery, playing with the concept of living with art versus living IN art. Here she explains why a White Cube is not always the best home for contemporary paintings and sculptures.
It [...]

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