Design Trust Fellowship at V&A East Fellows Announcement

With the latest Design Trust’s partnership with V&A East on curatorial programmes, we are pleased to announce Sian Fan, and Adam Huxley-Khng & Jimin Jeon as the inaugural fellows of the Design Trust Fellowship at V&A East. The fellowship received over a hundred applications worldwide responding to the theme “The Stories of Clothes” through a competitive selection process. The fellowship programme has commenced this Autumn, and will culminate with commissioned works on display from Autumn 2026 through Spring 2027.

Brendan Cormier (Chief Curator, V&A East) and Marisa Yiu (Co-Founder, Lead Curator/ Executive Director, Design Trust) are pleased to jointly announce the appointment of the inaugural fellows: Sian Fan, and Adam Huxley-Khng & Jimin Jeon. Their projects will leverage access to the V&A’s collection, enabling the practitioners to engage in object research and develop their own creative pursuits. This initiative furthers Design Trust’s mission to support meaningful projects that enhance expertise and build research initiatives and content related to Hong Kong, as well as the Greater Bay Area and China more broadly.

Sian Fan will be exploring her dual heritage in the fellowship programme, reflecting on her identity as half Chinese and British, and meditating on what it means to exist in between worlds.  In response to the theme “the Stories of Clothes”, Sian’s project builds on her heritage and familial journey from Northern China to the New Territories of Hong Kong, and ultimately to the UK. She will draw on new research of objects, stories and places to craft new narratives and works.

About Sian Fan

Sian 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, 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, fuelled by their curiosity for innovation and development in these items.

The duo will examine fasteners as a form of technology that are more than functional mechanisms or decorative roles. Rather, they define them as the “architecture and form of clothing”, tracing their evolution from pre-history to the present, from carved horn buttons to die-cast stainless steel zips, and how the origin of those fasteners reflect cultural significance, allowing them to be traceable across continents.

Their proposed fieldtrip to Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, and China more widely, will delve into China’s key role in the early development of a range of distinctive types of fasteners, such as knot buttons, as well as mass-manufacture of standardised fasteners, and recently the technologies behind innovative fastener-less clothing.

About Adam Huxley-Khng and Jimin Jeon

The duo’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.