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...
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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.