SHANGHAI, October 16, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- A legend 165 years in the making, Lane Crawford, Greater China's leading iconic luxury department store, hosted a cocktail reception last night at its Shanghai Times Square store to celebrate the "Visions From A New Generation" exhibition in collaboration with Swarovski.
Guests from the creative and fashion communities celebrated the renaissance of design and artisanal creativity in China. Emerging designers including SHU SHU/ TONG, Benwu Studio, Naihan Li, Sky Yutaka, Wan Hung Cheung, The Fabrick Lab, Ejing Zhang, Angel Chen also shared their visions of the future of fashion, art and lifestyle through their own fields of expertise. Each of the unique pieces showcased has incorporated Swarovski crystals, and all of them are inspired by traditional crafts, materials and cultures.
Besides gastronomic delights, the event also featured performance by GayBird, an acclaimed new media music and creative director from Hong Kong, as well as manicure and make-up services with Swarovski crystals.
The New Generation Creatives Leading the World into the Next 165 Years
Angel Chen: Project Acupuncture
Selected as one of the top five graduate designers of 2014 by i-D magazine, Angel Chen loves using bright colours and mixed materials to create free-spirited and quirky pieces for a new generation. Inspired by acupuncture, a traditional form of Chinese medicine, Chen has created a dress in which embroidered threads and Swarovski crystals represent the acupuncture points on fabric made from waxed paper.
Benwu Studio: Floating Galaxy
Peng You, Hongchao Wang and Wei Ge, co-founders of New York- and Shanghai-based Benwu Studio, have reinterpreted an ancient Chinese meditation technique to create an ingenious installation that lends physical form to sound. Applying the same principle of physics that "singing bowls" use to produce their tone, the installation uses acoustic vibrations to manipulate a swathe of Swarovski crystals, generating ripples and patterns like wind on a calm water surface.
Ejing Zhang: Armour
Selected by Wallpaper Magazine as one of the 'Best Graduate Talents 2014' winners, Chinese designer Ejing Zhang is one of the most exciting names in textiles and accessories design. With this piece, she celebrates the beauty of various materials to create a striking piece that is uniquely hers. Taking inspiration from a host of different sources, including landscapes, tribal colours and glass and ceramic art, she uses traditional fabric manipulating techniques to merge Swarovski crystals into soft textiles, before casting them to imbue the piece with a new form. The elements are then connected with hand-dyed ropes to form an exquisite piece of statement jewellery.
Gloria Yu: Supernova
Drawing inspiration from the humble Chinese herb star anise, Hong Kong artist Gloria Yu renders the distinctive ingredient in white and places a black Swarovski Jet Hem crystal at the centre of each to create an intriguing headpiece. By juxtaposing these contrasting materials, Yu has crafted a piece of armour for the woman warrior that walks the line between East and West, light and dark, and what was and what will be.
Naihan Li: Crystal Quartz
Inspired by the love of Chinese scholar stones and other natural rocks, Beijing-based artist and designer Naihan Li has created a wooden light installation in the shape of a quartz crystal rock. This distinctive piece embodies the futuristic floral aesthetic, with some surfaces opening up to reveal the Swarovski crystal lights and fiber-optic wires inside.
SHU SHU/TONG: Bubble Wedding
Shanghai-based emerging womenswear designers Liushu Lei and Yutong Jiang, the co-founders of SHUSHU/TONG, have created a one-of-a-kind wedding dress inspired by plastic bubble wrap. Using the technique of smocking, a traditional embroidery method practiced since the Middle Ages, the designers have weaved a constellation of glittering crystals through the fabric's folds to add a subtle and delicate shimmer, giving the dress a contemporary yet futuristic look.
Sky Yutaka: Light Flower
Hong Kong-based architecture design studio Sky Yutaka draws from one of the city's enduring traditional art forms - paper craft - in this kinetic lighting installation. By challenging a local paper craft master to reinterpret traditional techniques and incorporate finely cut Swarovski crystals, the studio has produced an innovative work that responds to movement in its immediate environment to create dynamic and continually changing lighting effects.
The Fabrick Lab: The Katoptron
Dubbed the 'techno fairy' by Elle Deco and winner of the 'Swarovski Designer of the Future Award 2015', Elaine Yan Ling Ng, founder of The Fabrick Lab is renowned for merging nature, technology and traditional techniques in her work. With 'The Katoptron', the designer takes her cue from the ancient form of mirrors, combining handcrafted textiles from Guizhou's ethnic minority groups with hand-spun materials and Swarovski crystals. She then uses this newly engineered textile composite, which she calls "Crystal Rock's Lace", to create a futuristic version of a Katoptron that surface pattern and colour changes according to how light travels through it, offering the spectator different views depending on their angle of vision.
Vivien Zhang: Gravity (Can Hold Us)
London-based artist Vivien Zhang explores the geographical and social voids of the modern age with this new painting. Bringing together a variety of materials, methods and motifs - including illustrations of Swarovski crystals, abstract brush marks and crumpled aluminium foil - Zhang creates a range of contradictions and collisions, which in turn offer possibilities for new hierarchies and connections. These ambiguous forms are a reflection of the frictions and contradictions of 21st-century life, and ask questions about how we as humans can assimilate the new and the unfamiliar into our established world order.
Wan Hung Cheung: MR.S
Award-winning designer Wan Hung Cheung has drawn on one of the most famous events in 20th-century Chinese history - the "Long March" of 1935 - to create this eye-catching piece. Taking the straw shoes in which the Chinese Red Army walked thousands of miles as his starting point, Cheung has combined the structure of the Chinese Terracotta Army's armour with the hand-weaving techniques of traditional straw shoes to create a pair of over-knee-high unisex boots adorned with hand-sewn crystals. The use of the colours black, red and yellow give the ancient materials a modern twist.
Xie Dong: Capture the Moment
Beijing-based artist Xie Dong is known for crafting works that explore the concept of seizing the ephemeral, and in 'Capture the Moment' she presents a ceramic vessel inspired by the movement of water. Irregular in form, the inside of the piece is partially encrusted with Swarovski crystals, recalling the appearance of glistening water droplets.
The "Visions From A New Generation" exhibition takes place from October 13 to 20, 2015 at Lane Crawford Shanghai Times Square store.
About Lane Crawford:
Founded in 1850, Lane Crawford is an iconic luxury department store driving a "connected commerce" strategy focused on creating a seamless shopping experience across its physical stores in Greater China and its global online store.
With more than 600,000 square feet of retail space, Lane Crawford has 11 points of sale across Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu. With an online store, purpose built for China while also shipping globally, Lane Crawford is China's first luxury omni-channel fashion retailer. Featuring the largest designer portfolio across Womenswear, Menswear, Cosmetics, Home and Lifestyle, and Fine Jewellery in the region, Lane Crawford showcases more than 1,000 international brands.
Lane Crawford is unique for its wholesale model and direct brand partnerships in a market otherwise dominated by concession models. This enables Lane Crawford to present its edit with authority in creative store environments fusing fashion, design, art and music, and extend elevated levels of personalised service. Regarded as an industry benchmark for innovation in retail concepts and creative, Lane Crawford holds a number of prestigious international awards including The National Retail Federation's International award selected by global industry leaders.
Lane Crawford is a part of The Lane Crawford Joyce Group, Asia's premier fashion retail and brand management group, which includes cutting-edge fashion boutique Joyce, fashion footwear, handbags and accessories specialist Pedder Group, retail, brand management and distribution company ImagineX and full-service retail management business Walton Brown.
About Swarovski:
Swarovski delivers a diverse portfolio of unmatched quality, craftsmanship, and creativity. Founded in 1895 in Austria, Swarovski designs, manufactures and markets high-quality crystals, genuine gemstones and created stones as well as finished products such as jewellery, accessories and lighting. Now celebrating its 120th anniversary and run by the fifth generation of family members, Swarovski Crystal Business has a global reach with approximately 2,560 stores in around 170 countries, more than 25,000 employees, and revenue of about 2.33 billion euros in 2014. Together with its sister companies Swarovski Optik (optical devices) and Tyrolit (abrasives), Swarovski Crystal Business forms the Swarovski Group. In 2014, the Group generated revenue of about 3.05 billion euros and employed more than 30,000 people. The Swarovski Foundation was set up in 2012 to honour the philanthropic spirit of founder Daniel Swarovski. Its mission is to support creativity and culture, promote wellbeing, and conserve natural resources. www.swarovskigroup.com
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