London Craft Week: Yi Crafts Brings China’s Hidden Textiles to Light
Tucked away in the heart of Camden, Yi Crafts is quietly reshaping the conversation around China’s rich cultural landscape. Founded in 2019 by Yiran Duan, a member of the Bai ethnic minority, this East Asian handcraft studio is built on a simple but powerful idea: that craft is culture made tangible. In a city celebrated for its diversity, Yiran observed an absence - China was often spoken of as a monolith, its dazzling tapestry of minority cultures overlooked. Yi Crafts exists to challenge that narrative, placing the vanishing crafts and cuisine of China’s ethnic groups into the spotlight.
Yiran Duan stitching for Bai Shibori, 2019
This May, Yi Crafts presents its first UK exhibition, Living Spirits: Bai Craft and the Art of Nature, as part of London Craft Week. Set within the elegant spaces of Cromwell Place, South Kensington, the exhibition runs from the 9th to the 18th of May, and offers a rare, multi-sensory encounter with the traditions of the Bai people, who live among the mist-covered mountains of Dali in Yunnan Province.
Bai ethnic group’s traditional outfit from Dali, ZhouChen. Photo by @ada_jli
To the Bai, nature is not a backdrop but a spiritual force and a presence to be honoured in everyday life. Their architectural style, known as San Fang Yi Zhao Bi (Three Memorial Archways and One Screen Wall), embodies this reverence, blending form and function with mountain folklore and geomantic principles. This interplay between built environment and belief runs like a thread through the exhibition.
Duan YinKai in her studio at the Dali Pu Zhen Bai Indigo Textiles Museum
Textiles, silverwork, ceramics, dreamstone, and woodwork become vessels of meaning - each one a quiet hymn to nature. Among the textile artists featured is Duan Yinkai, indigo dyer and founder of the Dali Pu Zhen Bai Indigo Textiles Museum. From a family steeped in Zhoucheng’s indigo dyeing tradition, Duan has spent decades reviving ancient techniques of Bai tie-dye. Her studio and museum are testament to a lifelong commitment to heritage; her accolades, from Folk Art Master to National Representative Inheritor, speak of deep respect, hard-won and enduring.
Yi wedding. Dali Fengyi village in Southwestern China. Photo by Yu Yang.
Alongside Duan’s indigo, visitors will discover the embroidery of Yang Wenhuan. Taught by her mother, Yang began stitching as a child, mastering traditional Bai costume techniques before adulthood. But her work goes beyond craft revival - it is an act of cultural restoration. Through painstaking research and design, she has brought back to life endangered heirlooms: the Crown Prince Hat, Paifang Scarf, and Lotus Picking Hat, to name a few. Her embroidered floral motifs sing of history, identity, and the hand that preserves them.
Duan YinKai at work in her studio.
Living Spirits is an invitation to consider what is lost when traditional knowledge fades, and what might be gained when it is cherished and shared. This is slow art at its most meaningful: shaped by mountain winds, dyed under the open sky, AND stitched with care by generations of women.
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Further information:
Yi Crafts
Living Spirits: Bai Craft and the Art of Nature: 9th to the 18th of May, Cromwell Place, South Kensington
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London Craft Week
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Image Credits:
Lead Image: Natural indigo dyed coin diamond table cloth, Yi Crafts.
All other images courtesy of Yi Crafts, and as credited in photo captions.