Profile: 呂知穎 – Real Leather Design Competitions

呂知穎

Shih Chien University

I was born and raised in Taipei—a city of layered textures, fragmented phrases, and sedimented time. My creative practice often begins from this landscape—drawing inspiration from its folds, frictions, and forgotten corners—and transforms these impressions into wearable forms through leather, thread, and image. I am a vegetarian, yet I support the use of genuine leather. This may sound contradictory, but for me, working with discarded or factory-surplus leather is a conscious choice to engage with the material realities of our time. It is a way of acting “in transition”—where death is not reduced to meaningless consumption, but is instead transformed into a vessel of durability, aesthetics, and cultural memory. Leather as a byproduct offers an ethical and practical compromise, resisting further waste, pollution, and overproduction. To choose is not to fix a label, but to exercise a continual sensitivity. Leather, as a skin with memory, bears traces of scars, scents, and time. Through it, I continue weaving a new, sustainable path forward. In my work, the body is not merely a container for clothing, but a site where sensation, memory, and temporality converge. I am deeply concerned with how the body co-constructs space and the city, leaving folds and warmth within cycles of forgetting and return. For me, creation is a slow act of approach—a process through which materials unfold their own will and thought. I choose to follow the path of the thread, rather than the shortest route. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, “We do not exist through thought, but through the body.” Through my work, I hope to invite viewers to reattune themselves to their connection with the world—to let clothing become a language of shared sensation, whispering through seams, remembering through folds.

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Dermascape

Category: Design*

Competitions: Taiwan Region

This work imagines Taipei as an organic being—one with its own skin, scars, and textures. The city is no longer merely a map or a spatial grid, but a surface inscribed with sensory traces. Using discarded leather offcuts from factories as my primary material, I construct a wearable sculptural garment that reassembles fragments of the city into a draped, tactile terrain. On each irregular piece of leather, I print black-and-white, blurred images captured throughout Taipei’s streets: folds in clothing, textures of human skin, the fur and forms of urban animals. These images are printed on the inner side of the leather—the invisible side, the side closest to the body. If photography is a record of light, a frozen moment, then leather is a remnant of past life. When image is pressed into skin, two distinct temporalities converge on a single surface, forming a shared memory that is both visual and tactile. The garment’s form does not follow traditional patterns; instead, it emerges from the natural edges and folds of the leftover materials. Through layering, stitching, and assembling, I create an asymmetrical, nonlinear silhouette—an organic structure shaped by contingency. Designed to be worn yet free from standardized sizing or fixed outlines, it accommodates multiple bodies—like a city continually compressed, expanded, and traversed. It permits transformation and anticipates rupture. Viewers are invited to lift and unfold the garment to see the hidden images within; from the back and sides, they can observe the strata of leather and the seams that hold them together. The entire piece can be turned inside out—allowing wearing and seeing to exchange positions, allowing skin and city to become containers for one another. Stacked leather resembles hills; seams resemble alleys; cracks unfold into the city’s edges—a geography measured against the scale of the body. Dermascape is a wearable landscape, a skin shared between city and self. Within its folds and stitches, memory is not buried—it continues to grow.

呂 知穎

Dermascape

呂知穎