The work juxtaposes the plaster foot—long employed in academic drawing—with the Tabi shoe of the fashion world. The former signifies an institutionalized and reproducible temporality of form; the latter, derived from the traditional Japanese “tabi” and transformed by Martin Margiela in 1989 into a potent fashion signifier, enters a temporal structure in which life is sustained through continual variation. Rather than positioned in opposition, the two are rendered coeval, pointing to the fissure between “trend” and “authenticity.”

Through a wet-on-wet technique that generates a veiled, atmospheric tension, Yi-Shuan Lee reflects on how capital and globalization erode historical density, while probing whether fashion and truth ultimately diverge—or converge along unexpected paths.