MPavilion Opening November 2020

Minjia Li

Image by Kate Meakin

After studying fashion design in China, Minjia Li moved to Australia to pursue her Master of Fashion (Design) degree at RMIT.

Drawing from her personal history and knowledge of unique Chinese social phenomena she wants to explore and reveal aspects of culture and thinking from China in her graduate work. On a recent trip back home to China she noticed something she had previously taken for granted—the way middle-aged women (dama) commonly dressed, often in protective items and in layers of patterned colourful clothes—her encounter with this style of dressing caused her to rethink Chinese fashion. Minjia is fascinated by the way that the unique Chinese social environment has created this fashion culture, and in her graduate work she focuses on understanding and redesigning Dama clothing.

Wominjeka (Welcome). We acknowledge the Yaluk-ut Weelam as the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet. Yaluk-ut Weelam means ‘people of the river camp’ and is connected with the coastal land at the head of Port Phillip Bay, extending from the Werribee River to Mordialloc. The Yaluk-ut Weelam are part of the Boon Wurrung, one of the five major language groups of the greater Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to the land, their ancestors and their elders—past, present and to the future.