Land of the Lustrous by Yingying Qiu. A Critical Review by Klimt02

Is beauty something that presents itself immediately, or something that holds itself back?
Or beauty may not be a visible quality, but an apparition. Not a state, but a phenomenon, something that unfolds over time, in a gradual act of revealing.

This is what Yingying Qiu sets in motion in Land of Lustrous. A beauty that does not offer itself at once, but unfolds gradually.
It is concealed within a dry material, removed from its natural environment. A black fungus, organic and brittle, that seems to belong more to decomposition than to ornament. To this are added pearls. Perfect pearls, made of resin, which appear natural without being so. As if what mattered were no longer origin, but appearance. Between signifier and signified, between what the pearl represents and what it actually is.

This shift is not insignificant. It introduces a tension between symbol and reality, between the imagined pearl and the conditions of its contemporary production. As the artist herself notes, this use of resin pearls is a way to work with the image of the pearl, deferring interpretation and allowing a tension to persist between the industrial and the organic.

Lustre, then, is no longer a surface quality. It becomes a deferred promise.
The pearl, like the heart of a flower not yet in bloom, remains hidden within this dark envelope. It only appears through an action. To open, to disturb, to alter. A form of rupture.

This gesture quietly echoes the very process by which a pearl is formed. The introduction of a foreign body into the mantle of the mollusc. An intrusion to which the living organism does not respond with rejection or destruction, but with enclosure.
The living envelops. Protects. Transforms.


Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme ? 
wrote Charles Baudelaire in Hymne à la Beauté, 1867.


As in myths where the pearl is by turns a divine tear or a fragment of the moon, its origin remains uncertain. Both purity and residue, brilliance and consequence. Qiu’s work does not stage an opposition between light and darkness, but their interdependence. Light only emerges when it is contained.
The fungus does not conceal the pearl.
It makes it possible. It becomes the ground on which this process of transformation, and of healing, can take place.
It acts like a skin. A fragile surface that protects as much as it delays, that shelters as much as it obscures. A skin that holds memory.


Yingying Qiu. Land of the Lustrous Bracelet, 2021. Dried fungal matter, cotton thread, resin pearls, plaster, and spray paint.


In the installation A Part of Me I Can Never Touch, the logic expands into space. Here, the pearls shift. They become natural pearls, no longer simulated but formed through a biological response to intrusion, a process of healing. The work unfolds almost organically, dispersing rather than asserting itself. 

It asks the viewer to slow down, to come closer, to look differently. Like jewellery, it exists at the edge of the body, without ever fully attaching to it.

The whiteness that runs through these forms, applied in layers of oil paint, does not seek to purify. It does not erase. It behaves more like nacre. A process of sedimentation, built up over time like mineral strata.
White is not innocence but deposit, memory and tension.


Yingying Qiu. A Part of Me I Can Never Touch, detail view, 2025. Sinamay fabric, dried fungal matter, white oil paint, freshwater pearls, plaster, sterling silver and resin.



Tu contiens dans ton œil le couchant et l’aurore.​

Yingying Qiu. Land of the Lustrous Brooch, 2021. Dried fungal matter, cotton thread, resin pearls, plaster, brass and spray paint.


Each element exists within this in-between. Between the organic and the mineral, between decay and persistence, what erodes and what endures.
What matters here is not the origin of beauty, but the way it appears. It is never simply given. It emerges through a process involving time and transformation.
The pearl, seemingly perfect, is the product of continuous alteration. A response to intrusion. A residue that becomes precious.
Before its mass production, it was sought, extracted, revealed. Today is produced and repeated across countless materials and processes. And still, its symbolic charge persists.

It is within this gap that Yingying Qiu’s work operates.
She does not resolve the contradiction. She sustains it. Between the organic and the artificial, between fragile and precious, between attraction and resistance.

Her pieces do not fully yield to the gaze. They remain at a distance, as if a part of them were untouchable. Because to alter them is already to begin to wear them down, and with that, their preciousness fades.


Yingying Qiu. Land of the Lustrous Collection, 2021. Dried fungal matter, cotton thread, resin pearls, plaster, and spray paint.


Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
Comme une fleur s’épanouir.
Charles Baudelaire, Une charogne, 1857.


Because perhaps decomposition does not oppose beauty. It conditions it.
What Yingying Qiu proposes is another temporality. A beauty that does not lie in immediate appearance, but in a cycle. Alteration, protection, transformation, revelation.
One that does not deny finitude, but is grounded in it.
Because in the faded flower, something of life still persists.



Yingying Qiu is a London-based jewellery artist with a background in Jewellery & Metal from the Royal College of Art and Fashion Design from the China Academy of Art. She perceives the textures of materials as metaphors for ‘skin,’ engaging in an intimate, tactile dialogue between jewellery and the body, fully aware of jewellery’s capacity to truly touch.

Instagram: @yingyingqiu_
Email: 10004023@network.rca.ac.uk



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