Mingfei Xu
Textile Design
Winchester School of Art
Graduates: 2022
Specialisms: Textiles - Print / Fashion Illustration / Fashion Merchandising
My location: London, United Kingdom
Mingfei Xu
First Name: Mingfei
Last Name: Xu
University / College: Winchester School of Art
Course / Program: Textile Design
Graduates: 2022
Specialisms: Textiles - Print / Fashion Illustration / Fashion Merchandising
My Location: London, United Kingdom
About
I'm textile print design undergrad. I had experience in jobs like modeling and fashion illustration, also working as a part time drawing teacher and freelancer.
As an international BA textile design student who grew up in Communist China and now lives in the UK, I have personally experienced different forms of propaganda. In this final major project, I want to explore how propaganda shapes societies and emotions and how it affects me as an audience through fashion textile print design. Propaganda, whether Eastern or Western, uses bold imagery with high-contrast colours and emotional messages to control public thought. In China, I witnessed state-driven public political speech and activities under censorship and misleading influencers online, causing Chinese people to hate and anger towards foreign countries and LGBTQ+ groups and the fear of having an opinion on politics. At the same time, in the West, I experienced curated freedom and rising disguised far-right hate posts on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), causing attacks towards minority groups. Both worlds reveal that propaganda always seeks control, often manipulating identity and emotions. Both the Chinese government and X have made me fear how and who is using propaganda, and I want to warn people before they fall into the wrong hands. Inspired by these experiences, I have created this collection through bold, symbolic colours to reflect authority, revolution, anxiety, and attention-seeking, and explore both surrealism and realism with a watercolour illustration to tell a story of how authority controls people through voice and emotional power of national storytelling to commands public action. Through these prints, I aim to raise awareness about how propaganda operates across cultures and encourage independent thinking, using fashion textiles as a medium to provoke thought and resistance. In the end, I hope everyone can be careful with the information they've received from social media, think twice before action, and be more considerate of people who are "different”, and be kind to each other.
Competitions
