Review of Untitlab ‘Seeing Querelle’ 2023 Ad Campaign by Art Director Tian Cai and Photographers Wang Lei and Jiang Kun with models Zeng Lixuan, Zhao Zheng, and He Jun
The latest campaign from the upstart Shanghai-based shoes and accessories brand Untitlab was captured by photographers Wang Lei and Jiang Kun, with art direction from Tian Cai.
The photographers were subtly inspired by 1987’s Querelle, the final film by director Rainer Werner Fassbinder based loosely on a Jean Genet novel. Creating an abstract space via incongruous visual elements of photography, sculpture, and costuming, they revisit the film’s themes of masculinity, violence, sensuality, and loneliness. The results are a spectrum of striking and surreal solo and duo portraits that suggest at once eroticism and narcissism, dissassociation and directionality.
It’s a campaign that is at once beautiful and stark, uplifting and troubling: a thoroughly impressive outing from a relatively small brand that further cements them as one of global fashion’s most artful new voices.
Art Director | Tian Cai
Photographers | Wang Lei and Jiang Kun
Models | Zeng Lixuan, Zhao Zheng, He Jun
Stylist | Qiudi
Hair | Zhang Ning
Makeup | Liu Wendi
Set Designer | Han Lam