With her Bamboo Mood living room collection for Roche Bobois and a takeover of the Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts in Paris, Jiang Qiong Er has had a momentous year. The artist–designer, who also co-founded the luxury craft brand Shang Xia with Hermès in 2009, has developed a philosophy of how to integrate culture — specifically her Chinese culture — into design.

“When it’s physically present as a real visual element, it’s limited by time. What I try to bring is the spiritual dialogue,” she says. “It could be a style, a philosophy, a proportion, a kind of emotion. It could be the sensibility when the wind blows on you. It’s abstract and therefore timeless.” We spoke with Qiong Er about three of the sources of inspiration reflected in both her furniture and her Guimet exhibition, Guardians of Time, which begins with a collection of mythical creatures installed like gargoyles on the historic building’s facade and culminates with a meditative dome.

1

Tradition

“For my Bamboo Mood collection with Roche Bobois, I did not use bamboo as a material, but rather as a symbol of our culture. You can see four different bamboo melodies: the first through the rhythm of the screen and the table; the second in the way that the tea table appears to come out of the earth like a bamboo root; the third in how the sofa echoes bent bamboo; and the fourth in the pattern of the rug, which comes from one of my paintings. The four melodies together, I’d say, represent the poetry of bamboo.”

2

Myth

“My most important brush is time. I always go back to history and create the future from there. For Guardians of Time, I created 12 mythical creatures. Each one calls for one of the collective values of mankind — freedom, bravery, wisdom, love, et cetera — and is based on research into the mythical creatures of the Asian civilization. But I then invite them to join us in the 21st century by using A.I. technology as my assistant to recreate and regenerate them. These new beings are unique: It’s the first time they were born to this world to be our messengers.”

3

Introspection

Photo by Fred Berthet

“For the Introspection part of the Guardians museum experience, I created a huge cave with a wall of 5,000 tea bricks. When you arrive, you have that true surprise of the smell. And then, with Roche Bobois, we created a stone garden in which there are around 20 different stones, all of them more than a thousand years old. Inside the 12 personal grottoes that surrounded it, you have a dialogue with yourself. You don’t need to see mythical creatures anymore, because maybe they are already inside of you.”