Profile: Fu Ling Kuo – Real Leather Design Competitions

Fu Ling Kuo

London College of Fashion

Fu-Ling Kuo is a Taiwan-based freelance costume designer and interdisciplinary artist. She holds an MFA from Taipei National University of the Arts and an MA in Costume Design for Performance from London College of Fashion (UAL). Her practice spans costume design, material research, leather craft, and makeup artistry across theatre, film, dance, opera, and immersive performance in Taiwan and the UK. She is a Gold Award recipient at World Stage Design 2022 and a member of BECTU and the Society of British Theatre Designers. Her work engages with post-colonial identity, Indigenous cultures, and Taiwan's layered colonial histories. Key works include Rusalka, a transforming patchwork kimono/qipao exploring Japan's Kominka assimilation policy in 1930s colonial Taiwan, and Unread Goodbye, a wire skeleton with a maternity dress referencing Taiwan's White Terror period. Her recent work Faces in Shift is a modular vegetable-tanned leather garment incorporating persimmon tannin dyeing and botanical printing, rooted in Taiwanese Indigenous culture and the hundred-pace snake mythology.

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Faces in Shift

Category: Apparel

Competitions: China Mainland, International

Faces in Shift explores the fluid, performative nature of cultural identity through a leather garment rooted in Taiwanese Indigenous mythology. It centres on the hundred-pace snake (Deinagkistrodon acutus), revered as a sacred ancestral guardian in Indigenous cosmology. As identity shifts and resurfaces in multiple contexts, so does the face the wearer presents to the world. The garment becomes a second layer that registers this continuous negotiation. The piece is made from vegetable-tanned leather, dyed using traditional persimmon tannin (kakishibu) techniques, and finished with iron-mordant botanical printing. In this process, plant matter is pressed directly onto the leather surface to transfer organic, asymmetrical patterns reminiscent of snake-skin markings. Wax-resist (batik) techniques control dye penetration, creating negative space resembling the geometric diamond motifs traditionally associated with the hundred-pace snake in Paiwan textile and carving traditions. The garment was developed in close collaboration with Taiwanese Indigenous actress Miyaw, integrating cross-Indigenous material knowledge into a contemporary wearable form. Rather than illustrating Indigenous symbolism literally, the design treats the body as a living surface, shifting and moving with the wearer and emulating the snake's symbolic role as a boundary figure between human and ancestral worlds.