Birdhead’s New Year Memories by Artist duo Birdhead
For this commission, the artist duo Birdhead reinterprets the rituals of celebration and remembrance in New Year Memories for Replica Maison Margiela Fragrances. Known for their distinctive use of photography as a living archive, Birdhead transforms intimate moments into collective memory. Through this lens, they reflect Maison Margiela’s poetic vision of time and identity.
Under Somexing Artistic’s curatorial direction, the collaboration bridges conceptual photography and brand storytelling. In the same movement, it connects the Maison’s sensibility for memories with Birdhead’s experimental process. As the result, the artwork celebrates the power of images to embody emotion and cultural continuity, turning the everyday into a space of artistic reflection.
Birdhead's New Year Memorie
Entitled “Birdhead New Year Memories”, this artwork is composed of black and white photographs that the artists developed themselves in their Shanghai studio’s darkroom. Through this analog process, they cultivate a sense of intimacy and material presence that goes beyond the image. Using staples, the artists assembled the photographs into a collage set against a hand-painted red background. On the top, they inscribed the handwritten Chinese character “Fu,” symbolizing good fortune. The gesture unites personal craftsmanship with cultural symbolism.
Each photograph revisits Chinese New Year traditions, capturing fleeting gestures, family gatherings, and street scenes that evoke both nostalgia and renewal. The hand-developed prints, arranged in collage form, blend personal narrative and collective memory, mirroring Maison Margiela’s conceptual exploration of remembrance. Guided by Somexing Artistic’s expertise in art collaborations, Birdhead New Year Memories becomes a contemporary meditation on time, photography, and identity, where craftsmanship and emotion merge into a timeless dialogue between art and brand philosophy.
Acrylic on wood board, black and white photocollage and staples
29 x 17 cm
Birdhead
Birdhead 鸟头 is a photographic collective founded in 2004 consisting of Song Tao and Ji Weiyu. Based on the aesthetic of the snapshot, the works of these two Shanghai-born-and-bred artists have earned them worldwide recognition. Analog photography is in the DNA of their work. BIRDHEAD captures fleeting moments of everyday life to offer a version of urban reality – idle youth, crumbling buildings, faded advertisements and other street scenes – that offers a striking contrast to the opulence of the Chinese megalopolis. The palpable tension in their work contrasts underlying reality with the kaleidoscopic diversity of life, while offering a profound reflection on the relationship between the material and the spiritual. Through their subjective representation, we witness live the changes of the city and its rapid development.
By combining the photographic matrix, collage, a particular editing technique, etc., Birdhead creates a “Birdhead world” in various exhibition spaces and a humanistic environment.
