Ximeng Liu

Ximeng Liu is a Chinese jewellery artist and product designer, based in Taiyuan and Beijing. She graduated from the Product Design department at Beijing University of Technology (BJUT) and completed her Master’s degree in Jewellery and Metal at the RCA. She has been exploring the relationship and boundary between everyday products and jewellery since she finished her product design study at BJUT.

For her project Can I Wear A Chair? Ximeng addresses the situation that when our lives are affected by COVID-19, we inevitably stay at home and become a sedentary people. We seem to spend more time with our furniture, especially our chairs than we do wearing jewellery. If physical contact is a requirement in the definition of jewellery, can we also use a chair as a piece of jewellery?

Ximeng’s starting point was the historical symbolism of jewellery and chairs, to find what they had in common. Within the COVID-19 background, for the theme Can I Wear A Chair? she envokes a fusion of both, in which the chair can be a wearable object. In the work, the jewellery acts as a medium, linking the three things: jewellery, chairs and people. They are independent of each other, but organic as a whole at the same time. For this practice, jewellery serves as a medium that connects and balances the jewellery, the chair, and the person. They are not only independent entities, but also an organic unity. Ximeng aims to offer an opportunity to rethink forms of expression and the boundaries of jewellery and within a specific context.

Exhibition Experience:

‘Double Yellow Line’, Winzavod Contemporary Art Center, Moscow, 2021

Jewellery Cultural Exchange Exhibition, Sunny Art Centre, London, 2020

Jewellery Cultural Exchange Exhibition, No Space, Beijing, 2020

RCA, WIP Show, 2020

Other Experience:

2017 Formula-E Design Championship (BJUT & ACCD), China Top 20

After four years of product design training in Beijing University of Technology, when Ximeng began to explore and learn how to use jewellery to express her ideas, she started thinking about the relationship between jewellery and products, and the relationship between people and jewellery and products; how do people interact with them, and what is the difference between these interactions? Can we think of a product as a piece of jewellery? Is there a clear boundary between jewellery and products? Can jewellery and products transform each other’s identities?

In the Jewellery and Metal department at the RCA, she has been exploring these questions and hoping to answer some of them through her practice. Affected by COVID-19, people were forced to stay at home for almost a year, working and studying online. She noticed that as people spent more time at home, they shifted their attention and time from jewellery and accessories to the everyday furniture they used. If interaction and contact with the body is a necessary condition for jewellery, could the chair that had the most contact with our bodies during the pandemic be considered a special piece of jewellery? Historically, chairs and jewellery have many similarities: they were symbols of power and status, and have gone through development that ranges from craft work to industrial production. Therefore, when a chair can be considered a piece of jewellery, how can one wear it? In her final year of study, Ximeng has been researching and exploring this question, and in the process she has started with three different objects: chairs, jewellery, and people, thinking and reflecting from different angles on how to handle the relationship between them, and most importantly, how to wear a chair. In terms of her work, she hopes it will be an experimental practice in which the product and jewellery boundaries are blurred. When audiences see and wear the work, they can consider the same question: can we have a new understanding of the chair and jewellery？