Design Trust Fellowship at V&A East Fellows Announcement

Design Trust Fellowship at V&A East, awards creative practitioners funding to engage in research at V&A East Storehouse, fieldwork in Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area and China where appropriate, and to produce a new creative work, which will be displayed at V&A East for a six-month duration. Brendan Cormier (Chief Curator, V&A East) and Marisa Yiu (Co-Founder, Lead Curator/ Executive Director, Design Trust) are pleased to jointly announce the inaugural fellows Sian Fan, and Adam Huxley-Khng & Jimin Jeon. Their projects will build upon the meaningful access to the V&A’s collection for creative practitioners to engage in object research and develop their own creative pursuits, furthering Design Trust’s mission to support creative projects that develop expertise, build research initiatives and content related to Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area and China more broadly.

2025 fellowship awardees: Sian Fan, and Adam Huxley-Khng & Jimin Jeon will embark on the inaugural Design Trust Fellowship at V&A East. The fellowship open call has received over one hundred applications internationally responding to the theme “the Stories of Clothes”. Through a competitive selection process with jury members including Brendan Cormier (Chief Curator, V&A East), Marisa Yiu (Co-Founder, Lead Curator / Executive Director, Design Trust), Jonathan Cheung (Board Member, Design Trust), Caroline Stevenson (Programme Director of Cultural and Historical Studies, London College of Fashion) and Georgia Haseldine (Senior Curator, V&A East). The inaugural V&A East Design Trust Fellowship commences October 2025, culminating in a commissioned work on display in Autumn 2026 through Spring 2027. Design Trust is pleased to be the first institution from the Greater Bay Area to partner with V&A East on curatorial programmes.

Sian Fan in the fellowship programme will be exploring her dual heritage, half Chinese and British, and meditating on what it means to exist in between worlds. Responding to the theme “the Stories of Clothes”, Sian Fan’s fellowship project stems from her curiosity to discover her own origin, and research her familial journey from Northen China to the New Territories of Hong Kong and eventually to the UK, as an opportunity to undertake new research that draws from objects, stories and places to craft new, fictional and fantastical narratives, and to create speculative stories.

Sian Fan is an interdisciplinary artist and has exhibited internationally with institutions including Tate Modern, Mutek Barcelona, Kunsthal Rotterdam, and FACT Liverpool, as well as producing work with Channel 4, the BBC and Meta. Recent projects include a new commission for the major exhibition CUTE at Somerset House, a motion capture performance for Digital Bodies Festival and a three-screen videogame installation for Art Exchange. Her work combines movement, the body and technology to explore embodiment, identity and human experience. This manifests as a meshing of the physical and the virtual, taking form as sculpture, costume, performance, animation, installation, and new media.

Adam Huxley-Khng and Jimin Jeon’s fellowship project centres on research into garment fasteners such as buttons, frog closures, and zips, with a curiosity about their future innovation and development. The fellows see fasteners as technologies that are more than just functional mechanisms or decorative details - they have defined the architecture and form of clothing from pre-history to the present. Their origin can be traced across continents, and their materiality a reflection of cultural origin, from carved horn buttons to die-cast stainless steel zips. Through visit Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, and China more widely, the fellowship research delves into China’s key role in the early development of distinct typologies of fastener such as frog closures and knot buttons, the mass-manufacture of standardised fasteners, and recently in the technologies behind distinctly fastener-less clothing.

Adam Huxley-Khng and Jimin Jeon’s collaborative and emerging practice centres on industrial design, driven by a shared interest in contemporary material culture and changing technological landscapes. They first worked together in Tokyo in 2019. Prior to working together Jimin was a designer and researcher at Sony. She studied industrial design in Korea, the UK, and Switzerland, and has worked at studios in Tokyo and London. Adam was previously an industrial design consultant at Pentagram, and has worked at design offices in London, Stockholm, and Tokyo. Their current projects focus on industrial design and development, based on cultural and technological research, with projects in the UK and East Asia.