DANCING WITH TIME

After establishing the first modern Chinese luxury house, JIANG QIONG ER opens a new exhibition in Paris straddling art and design that fuses the past and the future.

- Y-JEAN MUN-DELSALLE

Jiang Qiong Er has made it her life's work to revive traditional Chinese crafts through contemporary design, bridging cultures and eras to build a 21st-century way of living. Like a time traveller, the Chinese artist and designer, who shuttles around Paris, Bordeaux and Shanghai, goes back in history to create the future through designs she calls time vessels. She explains, "It's about connecting the timelessness from the past with the timeless side of today and tomorrow. I am passionate about this because if we don't connect this past to the future, if we don't pass it on, then it will disappear forever."

FREEDOM FOUND

In 2009, Jiang co-founded Shang Xia, the revolutionary Shanghai-based luxury lifestyle maison, in collaboration with Hermès, and helmed it for over a dozen years. After meeting then Hermès CEO Patrick Thomas and creative director Pierre-Alexis Dumas, she was invited to be the first Chinese artist-designer to create Hermès store window displays in China. There, she introduced Chinese craftsmanship, which led to their decision to jointly establish Shang Xia to showcase Chinese savoir-faire to the world. "We shared the same dream and the same passion," Jiang recalls. "It was not an investment project; it was a beautiful encounter and dialogue, a passion to create the renaissance of excellence from tradition."