Reviving Craft Closes Its European Trilogy at Somerset House

Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind closes on Sunday at Somerset House in London, ending the final stop of a three-city European tour that pairs Chinese intangible cultural heritage with contemporary design. The exhibition, an official special partner project of the 2026 London Design Festival, opened on September 16 and runs through September 27.

Organized by Sun Media Group, the show gathered nearly 150 works and sets of works by more than 70 Chinese and international artists, according to Xinhua. The selection spans ceramics, lacquer, embroidery, glass, fiber art, furniture and installation, much of it made by living heritage masters working alongside contemporary designers.

A trilogy across Europe

London is the closing chapter of the Reviving Craft trilogy. The series began in 2024 at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, where it explored the relationship between humanity and nature, and continued in 2025 at Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan with a focus on humanity and society. The London edition turns the question inward, to humanity and the self, a theme the organizers say speaks to an age of acceleration and anxiety.

The exhibition is jointly curated by Su Dan, a professor at the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University and former deputy director of the China National Arts and Crafts Museum, and Yang Lan, the journalist who chairs Sun Media Group and co-founded the Reviving Craft series.

Visitors move through three sections named for Chinese concepts of the mind: Chengxin, clearing the mind; Xiuxin, refining the mind; and Yangxin, nourishing the mind. Drawing on Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism, the sequence leads from stillness and discipline toward what the Reviving Craft curators describe as a unity of object and mind.

From embroidery screens to down jackets

The craft roster reads like a survey of living Chinese traditions. Sculptor Zhi Min shows the ceramic and metal work Moon; Shi Hui presents the paper-fiber piece Seal Stone; lacquer artist Xue Xiaodong contributes a screen inspired by The Ode to the Goddess of the Luo River; and Suzhou embroidery artist Yao Jianping brings the double-sided embroidery screen Nine Carps.

Contemporary jade art brand HANZEXI adds another layer. Founded by artist Benxin, who left her previous career at 35 to take up jade carving, the brand shows representative works from series including Bamboo Sea, The Road and Deep Sea, made with master artisans in Chinese filigree, inlay and inkstone carving.

Big consumer brands join the heritage conversation in the Reviving Craft galleries. BOSIDENG, the down jacket company marking its 50th anniversary, brought the Xi Collection to the Refine the Mind section: an artistic line that fuses Eastern intangible cultural heritage aesthetics with modern down craftsmanship, led by a garment with a fan-shaped silhouette whose gathered waist echoes a half-opened folding fan, according to Haiwainet.

Denza, the premium new-energy vehicle brand from BYD Group founded in 2010, contributed installations titled Vast Visions of Lacquered Arcs, Splendid Stitches in Cabin and Weave of Speed. The works embed bamboo-weave textures in wheel design, sculpt the brand emblem in lacquer and stitch Canton embroidery into a cabin interior, a direct blend of centuries-old craft and electric-car engineering.

Furniture maker Maintur, representing Dongyang wood carving, a national intangible cultural heritage, presents the Dragon and Phoenix Harmony Jiaoyi-style Thrones, carrying imperial court furniture traditions into a contemporary setting.

Heritage craft has been finding younger audiences in recent years, and the Reviving Craft format is built for that shift. The show asks what centuries-old disciplines of the mind offer people living at speed, and answers it with lacquered car parts, embroidered screens and fan-shaped down jackets, a sign that old craft does not have to stay in a museum case to stay relevant.

For London audiences, Sunday is the last day to catch Reviving Craft at Somerset House before the trilogy wraps its three-city run. The show lands in a busy autumn for craft-led exhibitions: the Turner Prize 2026 opened in Middlesbrough on September 26, with four shortlisted artists taking on oil, deindustrialisation and precarity. Sunday's closing brings that European tour to an end.