Nearly 150 works by more than 70 artists arrive in London as an official special partner project of the 2026 London Design Festival.
An exhibition pairing China’s intangible cultural heritage with contemporary design opened at Somerset House on 16th September, bringing nearly 150 works by more than 70 Chinese and international artists to one of London’s most storied cultural landmarks. Xinsheng Wanwu — China Intangible Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Design, known in English as “Reviving Craft” — is presented by Sun Media Group and serves as an official special partner project of this year’s London Design Festival.
The London show is the closing chapter of a European trilogy. A 2024 edition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris explored the relationship between humanity and nature; a 2025 outing at Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan turned to humanity and society. The London exhibition turns the question inward, to humanity and the self — a theme its co-curators, Su Dan, a professor at Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts and Design and former deputy director of the China National Arts and Crafts Museum, and Yang Lan, the journalist and chair of Sun Media Group, say speaks to an age of acceleration and anxiety.
The works are arranged in three sections — Clearing the Mind, Refining the Mind and Nourishing the Mind — drawing on Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist ideas of the “mind” and moving the visitor from stillness and discipline towards what the curators call a unity of object and mind.
Highlights include “Crossing the Sea”, a garment-like installation strung from shards of blue-and-white porcelain; “Orchid”, a glass flower by the young artist Lieyang; and an interactive AI work by the digital artist Jin Jun, based on the Five Dynasties painting “Sketches of Precious Birds”, which lets visitors colour a bird on a small screen before it flies across a large one. Elsewhere, visitors can watch hidden mortise-and-tenon joints assemble a wooden bridge or a palace through transparent screens — an example, the curators say, of technology used to deepen rather than compete with craftsmanship.
British design and art media have taken notice. Dezeen listed the exhibition among the craft highlights of this year’s festival, noting its aim of staging “a dialogue between traditional craft and contemporary design”. FAD Magazine wrote that “ancient techniques find contemporary forms” and called the show “well worth a dedicated trip to Somerset House this month”. Art Plugged observed that the exhibition “does not present craft as spectacle, but asks whether an object, given enough attention, can become a medium of introspection”, while Livingetc put it on its festival itinerary, writing that “China’s long cultural heritage finds new life in this exhibition”.
At the opening ceremony, Yang Lan said that in the age of artificial intelligence, making things by hand allows people to rediscover human embodied intelligence — “a connection we can touch, one that gives us strength and inspiration” — and voiced the hope that the exhibition could serve as a bridge between Britain and China, especially between their young people. Li Liyan, minister counsellor at the Chinese Embassy in the UK, said the value of intangible heritage lay not only in preservation but in “integrating into the present and facing the future”, and called the touring exhibition “a window for the world to experience contemporary China”. Nikki Dewar, projects director at the Crafts Council, also spoke.
Guests at the opening included members of the British royal family — among them Peter Phillips, son of the Princess Royal — as well as the former Royal Ballet principal Darcey Bussell, the gallerist Timothy Taylor, Somerset House’s director Jonathan Reekie, London Design Festival co-founder Ben Evans and the model and actor Hu Bing, alongside figures from the design, business and arts worlds.
In an interview during the exhibition, Yang Lan argued that much of the wisdom of hand-making cannot be captured by large language models. She recalled the Zhuangzi parable of a wheelwright whose skill was “won by the hand and answered by the heart, but could not be spoken”, and quoted Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” Heritage, she said, has never stopped evolving — “tea was boiled in the Tang dynasty, whisked in the Song, steeped from the Ming and Qing onwards” — and the task today is to let old crafts tell contemporary stories.
The exhibition is supported by the special partners Jiannanchun and Bosideng, chief AI technology partner JD.com, chief display technology partner BOE and official vehicle partner BYD, with further support from the China National Furniture Association, the Liangzhu Culture Conservation and Research Foundation, Dunhuang Museum and other partners.
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