My Views of Wang Chuan by Xiaomu Zhao

Artist list

Xiaomu Zhao

The Wangchuan Collection is a representative work of the late Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei, containing a total of 20 five-character quatrain poems, which were created corresponding to 20 scenes in his secluded residence Wangchuan Villa. In the coming exhibition, artist Xiaomu Zhao shall reinterpret each poem in Wangchuan Collection using jewellery as a discourse.

Wang Wei liked to record his experience of appreciating the mountains and rivers with a line drawing technique. Behind those brief, simple, and even plain sentences lie the poet’s nostalgic state of life. Over a thousand years later, when Xiaomu read this collection, she stumbled; those poems dragged her into infinite imagination and deeply imprinted into her mind. Beyond the literal scenery, as a creator, she seemed to have captured the poet’s state of mind towards life back to that distant time and space, which are precisely the views she wanted to convey through her works.

As a female artist, Xiaomu’s works exude a touch of elegance and a unique sense of freedom. She often uses coloured stones in her works to depict the mountains and rivers, so her jewellery design naturally possesses a sort of oriental charm. The solid metalwork techniques allow her to showcase the plasticity of metal materials to the extreme between the blades, but her creation does not rely solely on hand-craftsmanship. The 20 pieces of jewellery to be exhibited not only form a series but also exist independently. Across this series, we can see a wide range of materials and technologies, natural or artificial, traditional or digital, and even 3D printing with multiple materials. Over the years, the accumulation of jewellery design experience has enabled Xiaomu to fully leverage the possibilities of technology, allowing her works to be produced in a relaxed but precise state. The so-called treating of any technology as a hammer in hand is perfectly interpreted here.

A unique feature of the Wangchuan Collection is that it includes the one-to-one responses from Pei Di, Wang Wei’s friend, to each of his poems, which were also written as five-character quatrains. Xiaomu acclaimed that she envied this kind of soul-mate friendship between Wang Wei and Pei Di so much. Despite the long distance from the poet both in terms of time and space, it did not hinder Xiaomu from approaching the horizon in Wang Wei’s poetry. So, in this special way, Xiaomu decided to cross time and space by creating these 20 pieces of jewellery to respond to the 20 pomes in Wangchuan Collection.

/Liang Xiao

Opening times: 13.00- 18.00 h.
Opening event: 15th April 2023 15.00-18.00 h.