Three girls in lockdown, three different countries, three different ways of coping with quarantine. Does it sound exciting? This is Miss Quarantine, a project by Laura Martinova. Last week we travelled to Milan to meet the stylist Julia Beo, but for the second fashion film of this series, we make a journey to the other side of the world, Shanghai, to get to know the artist and model Wenqi Zou.
It is said that the most powerful thing in life is passion. As long as there are passion, drive and creativity, there will be light even in the darkest days. Photographer and director Laura Martinova proved this to us last week, and now she does it again with Miss Quarantine Pt. 2 Shanghai.

“Our communication in English was difficult,” says Laura, but that didn’t stop her and Wenqi from achieving an outcome they were both happy with. The Chinese artist and model “had to do the camera work, art direction and styling alone,” which resulted in a series or portraits of her reading, creating art or even petting her cat. “It was quite funny to direct cats through Skype,” recalls Laura. “They didn't want to be in front of the camera and we had to wait until one of them was calm and wanting to be in the shot.”

Even if Wenqi misses travelling so much, she has also adapted to her daily life during this pandemic and learnt to enjoy having free time. “It leaves me a lot of time and space to think about myself and my own life,” she says. “Now that I have fully adapted to this kind of life and enjoy it, I cherish this period very much.” She’s coping it through creating her works, cooking, studying, reading, and preparing her graduate application. She’s also working on two new projects: one about establishing a virtual fashion accessory brand, and the other about “the observation of the visual images created after being forcibly intervened and changed by the machine image language on the Internet”. But after the storm comes the calm, and it seems that we are starting to see that better days are coming. Watch this hopeful message in Miss Quarantine Pt. 2 Shanghai.
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