Twenty years, twenty people.
In 2004, since the inception of "ELLE DECORATION", we have met a group of like-minded partners, and along the way, we have witnessed the changes in Chinese design, culture, art and fashion.
In order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of DECO, we have invited 20 "old friends" from the fields of fashion, culture, art, architecture and design. In conversations that span space and time, ask them to share their observations in their fields over the years.
From 20 years of beauty, 20 years of design, and 20 years of home changes, they reflect the times with individuals, not only drawing a multi-dimensional picture of the times for us, but also inspiring thinking about the future with their wisdom and experience.
In the last episode, DECO invited 10 "big names" in the fields of culture, art and fashion to talk about their ideals and observations over the past 20 years.
Characters are listed in alphabetical order by surname
This family has lived in Bao Yifeng for more than 10 years, and his home is full of his collection. (Photo source: Interviewee)
I have known Bao Yifeng for almost 20 years, and the first time I participated in the activities he did, I don't remember what brand it was, but no matter how complicated and huge the activity is, as long as he is there, it is like a Dinghai God Needle, stable! Xiaobao, who was born and raised in Shanghai, is affectionately called "Shanghai Bao" by his friends, and the media circle and fashion circle in Shanghai are basically his circle of friends. When Louis Vuitton launched the Shanghai City Guide in 2023, he became a guest editor-in-chief, and he knew all the best places to visit in Shanghai. Later, he progressed from a private collector to an art fair operator, which coincided with the vigorous development of the domestic fashion culture and art industry for 20 years.
From a public relations agency to the co-founder of ART021, Bao Yifeng has witnessed the development of fashion and art in the past 20 years. "It's all about the development of the city, and my own PR agency started in 2002 with a majority of luxury brands, mostly based in Hong Kong or Singapore. But with the completion of Hang Lung Plaza and Xintiandi in 2001, a new way of life was brought to Shanghai. In 2005, MOCA was introduced in People's Park, bringing a new international exhibition. After the 2010 World Expo, the Nanshi Power Plant was transformed into PSA Power Station of Art. Since 2012, various private art museums have gradually come into view, such as Long Museum, Shanghai Center of Photography (SCoP), HOW Art Museum, Yuz Museum, Fosun Art Center, ...... Today, we have more international institutions such as Pudong Art Museum, West Bund Art Museum, Star Art Museum, and PHOTOGRAFISKA. UCCA Center for the Arts, founded in Beijing in 2007, opened in Shanghai in 2021. At the same time, major luxury exhibitions, including Dior, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Tiffany, Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier, etc., are also meeting in the art museum and even the Forbidden City, showing not only classic designs, but also cross-border collaborations with domestic and foreign artists. With the rise of auction house previews and art fairs, the art ecology is becoming more and more prosperous. To this day, Shanghai and Beijing have occupied a pivotal position on the world stage of art and fashion. ”
For me, ELLE DECORATION is a book that opens the door to a home of wonderful colors, allowing me to see countless colors, countless designer friends, and countless friends' homes. I wish DECO a happy 20th birthday!
At the Cannes Film Festival that just ended, Zhang Ziyi appeared on the red carpet, and the security gave him a special courtesy, and the fans outside the venue screamed. What I didn't expect was that as soon as Zhang Ziyi walked over, there was another scream, and it turned out that the fans found Mr. Dai Jinhua, who entered the crew in a low-key manner...... As a cultural scholar, Ms. Dai has become a "cultural star", and her fan base is cross-age, transgender, and even cross-border. If "fans want to live like idols", Mr. Dai "protects" her private life very well, in fact, she does not deliberately "protect", but compared to books and movies, she is unwilling to spend too much time on the details of life.
In her opinion, in the 80s and 90s of the last century, those "foreigners in Beijing" brought us the first batch of "life demonstrations" combining Chinese and Western cultures. At the same time, some Chinese have also begun to go to all parts of the world, and the life model of different countries has become the life yearning of many Chinese. It wasn't until their second generation, when they grew up with a more international experience, that between the decision of going or staying, their understanding of home gradually became self-oriented and internalized.
"In the past two years, I have been to several courtyard houses in Beijing's hutongs, and they are all places where my Taiwanese friends came to Beijing and found them by themselves. A few young people share a yard, which has been renovated and shared with others in some new ways, and the furniture, objects, and some of them are found in the thrift market, and they all look like true love...... Many of these young people are architects and designers, and they reject the usual criteria for success and are exploring inward in a more self-conscious way. There are many such places in Yunnan, in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and there is not much space. ”
The establishment of the main body of Chinese culture cannot only stop at the conscious emphasis on cultural consciousness, we must make it a high degree of consciousness, let it penetrate our consciousness, and guide our creation.
Affectionately called "Doudou" by friends in the circle, Gu Yeli is the founder of Ontimeshow, the earliest exhibition for designer brands in China. From the first edition of the Jing'an 800 Show in the fall of 2014 to the 20th edition at the West Bund Art Center in 2024, the exhibition area has expanded from 1,000 square meters to 25,000 square meters today, and the number of participating brands has increased from 48 to more than 4,000 now. Behind the numbers, it represents the future of the real Chinese fashion industry. As a senior designer said, "good design must be a good business", and only by judging from the dimensions of business, communication, and aesthetics can it be a healthy industrial ecology.
"As far as I am concerned, from the perspective of the times, going back 20 years, as a film art and fashion design practitioner, my relationship with fashion is more like a consumer witness, and the next 10 years are the witnesses and participants of the vigorous development and transformation of China's fashion industry. Ten years ago, a group of designers who studied abroad and learned a lot began to choose Shanghai as the next stop after Paris, Milan, New York, and London. Focusing on our niche fashion designer field, consumers have new needs for brand culture, new shopping methods and experiences, and have experienced significant diversification and personalized taste development over the years. ”
"ELLE DECORATION Home Gallery" records and witnesses the development of many talented designers and designers in China, and looks forward to more Chinese design forces being known to everyone through this platform in the future and getting more development opportunities!
From May 18 to June 20, 2024, artist Su Chang's solo exhibition "Let Time Pass" may be ShanghART Shanghai's last exhibition on the West Bund. (Image source: ShanghART Shanghai)
As the first contemporary art gallery to be established in Shanghai in the 1990s, and the first foreign-owned gallery to set up in Shanghai, ShanghART is perhaps more famous than its founder, Lorenz Helbling. However, in the Chinese and foreign art circles, the name "Lawrence" does not need too much introduction...... In everyone's mind, Lawrence always appeared on necessary occasions in a low-key black dress all year round, with lightweight glasses covering deep eye sockets, and his expression and words were not much, but he always made people remember this low-key gallerist from Switzerland.
Back in June 1996, ShanghART Gallery was officially established at the Portman Hotel in Shanghai, where the artist's first solo exhibition was held. Prior to this, ShanghART also had a special exhibition space, Lawrence's own home in Shanghai. Since then, ShanghART Gallery has opened several spaces in Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore, becoming a non-negligible presence in the contemporary art scene in Asia and the world. In the late autumn of 2017, a new book titled "20 Years of ShanghART Gallery" quietly entered the field of vision of colleagues in the art world, and everyone suddenly realized: Lawrence's "ShanghART" has gone through 20 years.
In the early summer of 2024, ShanghART and a number of galleries and artist studios will move out of the West Bund Art and Culture Demonstration Zone, and people will come to check in and say goodbye, and the Huangpu River will quietly watch the renewal of the city's art districts and the increasingly vibrant Chinese contemporary art ecology.
ELLE DECORATION has always been a concern, companion and supporter of the art industry, sharing and disseminating design and lifestyle from a professional and avant-garde perspective for 20 years, documenting the development and changes of the times, and inspiring countless ideas and inspirations. We look forward to inspiring more design power and bringing infinite possibilities to DECO in the future chapter!
The cover of the June 2023 issue features Rebecca's home in Shanghai, designed by Wang Changxing. (Photo: Sekiri)
"Advocate of a better life" in the eyes of 30 million readers, founder of the short video IP of "100 Chinese Girls' Home", and the manager of the brand "Li Becca's Fantasy World". Among the countless media professionals who have transitioned from print media to new media, Rebecca is undoubtedly among the best. Last spring, DECO listened to her new home in Shanghai's Wutong district tell her about her life, speaking like a girl next door. However, she prefers to listen to other people's stories rather than being interviewed, and through her observations, we see the transparent views of contemporary Chinese women on life and beauty.
"My job has always been a recorder and an observer, so it's a big step forward to be able to feel that people who may have had a more one-dimensional and conservative standard of beauty are now bolder and more self-conscious. 99% of my readers are girls, and when I talk to girls of different ages, occupations, and lifestyles, I can clearly feel this - women's sense of independence and self-awareness is getting stronger and stronger, from trying to conform to the outside world's standards of beauty, to paying more attention to their own feelings, and they are placed in a very important position. She said, "From the popularity of new Chinese style and national style in recent years, it can be seen that in the past, Western aesthetics were the mainstream standard, which also affected our aesthetics, but in recent years, everyone's acceptance of traditional culture has become higher and higher, and more and more designers have excavated elements of traditional culture into works and integrated them into daily life." On this basis, I believe that some new trends will be driven and more and more aesthetic languages will collide. ”
I often say that 'home is a museum of life', and ELLE DECORATION is like a museum of home for me, where everyone can find their ideal home. I hope that DECO will take us to see more beautiful spaces, so that more people can feel the healing power of beautiful spaces.
《ELLE DECORATION家居廊下》August 2007月刊登了林菁的家。 (Shadow: A. Chester Ong）
Lin Jing was one of the first Chinese designers she met when DECO was founded, when she had just returned from studying sculpture in Belgium and wanted to integrate her creations into her daily life, creating Keke, Qiqi tea sets, men's stools, women's stools, trousers vases...... Many of them have been precipitated into classics of contemporary Chinese design.
As one of the first residents of Beijing's 798 Art District, her cool home in the loft space was photographed and reported by many domestic and foreign design media at that time. Around 2008, she founded the famous boutique "Non-Space" in 798, which integrates fashion, home and lifestyle, so cool and beautiful, but unfortunately it is a little too early......
More than ten years ago, Lin Jing picked up the brush again, using the color blocks and textures on the canvas to wander and think between abstraction and realism...... Lin Jing's recent solo exhibition "Elephant True White I, II" at EGG Gallery in Beijing is titled "The Truth Revealed". During the pandemic, a number of large-scale paintings with animals as the theme, figurative animal shapes and abstract complex backgrounds are intertwined, and the artist's rare passion and confidence burst out of the canvas and filled the entire exhibition space.
From design to art, in Lin Jing's view, it is just that the medium and method of creation are different, what remains unchanged is always passion and perseverance, and the integration of Chinese and Western cultures throughout the work has become more and more natural, for 20 years!
祝愿《ELLE DECORATION家居廊》一如既往递进时代的精髓！
At the Comme Moi 10th anniversary show at Shanghai Fashion Week 2023, Lu Yan invited dozens of model friends, including Ma Yanli and Qu Ying, to the catwalk, these women who have become famous in the past 30 years like her, spanning the age group from 20 to 50 years old, like a history of Chinese modeling. Model, that was the first half of Lu Yan's life, and in the second half of her life, she chose to be a designer, and founded her own fashion brand Comme Moi in 2013.
"In fact, in the five years from 2005 to 2010, I did a lot of other things outside of modeling, either to make money, or to try and learn to see what I could do. For example, he did styling for magazines, and after returning to China, he also made a cameo appearance in the crew, but in the end, he didn't want to be an actor or continue to be a model, because they were all professions that were not under his control. ”
There is a lot of pressure to transform and start a business, but she has found a sense of balance that is both relaxed and tense, and the good things in life and the family she loves will not be absent because she wants to fight for her career. Comme Moi means "as me" in French, perhaps, like "I", I do not set limits on myself, and I can live, learn, and experience as much as possible in a limited time, so as to live up to my time.
祝《ELLE DECORATION家居廊》二十周年生日快乐!
Soon after the launch of the magazine, DECO met Juan, and it has been 20 years in the blink of an eye! Juan is now very famous, the "Belgian old man" who carefully restored the ancient temple next to the Forbidden City is him, and many people respectfully call him "Mr. Wen", and his Chinese name is "Wen Shounuo". Juan is actually only in his early 60s, but he has been in China for 30 years! In the past 20 years, Juan has moved several times in Beijing, almost every home will be photographed by the media, and DECO has published Juan's home more than once. Soon after we met Juan, we heard that he was preparing to restore a temple in a hutong, and we had visited the construction site with him. After years of restoration, it has been more than ten years since the temple was opened to the public. If you search for "Dongjingyuan", "Songzhu Temple", "Zhizhu Temple" on the Internet...... The sheer amount of information that pops up is too much to read in one night. In any case, many people understand "repairing the old as the old" from here, and more people are willing to come here to walk around, sit, drink tea, watch solo exhibitions, have a meal, and listen to a concert...... The courtyard in summer has a natural shade, the yard is very popular, everything is in an elegant tone, and it should not be an exaggeration to say that this is one of the few taste landmarks in Beijing.
"How much has changed in the past 20 years! The main thing is the change of people, and today's young people are improving their aesthetics very quickly, and they are pursuing more and more beauty. SOMEONE CAME TO LIAIGRE TO BUY AN ARMCHAIR FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS AND COLLECTED IT AS A WORK OF ART; After a while, come and buy one or two pieces of beloved furniture, instead of buying a complete set of furniture like the previous guests, this kind of piece by piece, with heart to match, is true love; They realize that the quality of the lights at home is very important, especially if there is a collection of artworks, the requirements for lighting are higher, and the quality of light is required, which was rare 20 years ago. He said, "Chinese now have a 'sense of security' than before, and with a 'sense of security', the consciousness of consumption has changed, and they are willing to spend some money for 'beauty'."
I hope that ELLE DECORATION will become a platform for inspiration and help more readers find their own aesthetics, so as to bring peace and happiness.
Yu Hong's © solo exhibition "Tossing in the Dust", April 20 – November 24, 2024 Yu Hong. (Courtesy of Lisson Gallery, photo by George Darrell)
Focusing on the process of individuality, growth, and life has always been the artistic context that artist Yu Hong has been thinking about and practicing since the beginning of her creation in the 90s. This vein is also enriched and changed with the accumulation of her life experience, like a big tree, bearing abundant fruits, and constantly growing new branches; When she first graduated from college, she painted portraits of her peers and young girls; Later, she paid attention to the relationship between individual growth and social changes, painting "witnessing growth" and painting the people around her; Later, she was not satisfied with painting the ego and the individual's experience, but longed to find echoes from the classics of the East and the West, and found the connection point of empathy with the individual, so she had works such as "Heavenly Ladder" and "Heavenly Question...... This year, her exhibition "Tossing in the Dust" at the Venice Biennale takes the ultimate topics of life and death, and desire, which are both everyday and philosophical, as the source of her work. For her, life and times are all going back and forth in daily life, and it is a long, changing, and uncertain process.
On weekdays, Yu Hong goes to school every morning to attend classes and deal with trivial tasks, and spends her afternoon painting. And how the artist's creation, especially oil painting, responds to the times and expresses herself between this limited square inch canvas is something she ponders every day, this process is "quite difficult", but interesting!
I wish ELLE DECORATION magazine a happy 20th birthday, and we will walk with art together and get better and better!
Bishan Academy, where Zuo Jing and his team work and live in the countryside. (Photo: Yan Qing)
I first met Zuo Jing because of the Bishan Project he initiated in 2011, which is the earliest art revitalization rural practice project in China that has a far-reaching impact to this day, and he is regarded as a representative of China's art rural construction, and continues to promote the experiment and practice of China's rural construction as a curator and scholar. In 2023, DECO invited Zuo Jing to become a member of the jury of the China Interior Architecture Design Yearbook, and set up the "China New Rural Construction" award for the first time, hoping to convey a sustainable concept of rural construction. Although there was no winner in the inaugural award due to the consideration of lack rather than abundance, such a discussion has already been vigorously developed. A little bit of progress every year, and in another 20 years, it will be a new Chinese village.
As a witness and participant, Zuo Jing is willing to take the concept and practice of "long-lasting design" of Kenaki Oka, the founder of the Japanese design campaign, as the most innovative project in the past two decades. In the era of consumerism, design is updated very frequently, and Nagaoka Kenaki feels that this is not right, and the rapid iteration of products is a particularly unfriendly behavior to society and nature. Therefore, his main mission is to discover the locality of each region and the design that persists in the local area. "From this perspective, the flip side of what I understand as 'long-lasting design' is 'place design'. Isn't that the same true for China? Why do we go to small places? Why do we go to the countryside? It is because many beautiful things exist in those remote places, in places that have not been coerced by modernization and industrialization. ”
As an important media focusing on home aesthetics and life aesthetics, ELLE DECORATION is keenly aware of the importance of craft aesthetics, rural aesthetics and new design concepts.
Space is limited, and the full interview can be found here
7月号《ELLE DECORATION家居廊》杂志
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What cultural, artistic, and fashion events have stood out to you over the past 20 years? Welcome to leave a message below to share your thoughts with us, DECO will select three wonderful messages, each of which will give away a new issue to share the happiness of "20th birthday".
Planning 丨 Editorial Department of this journal
Illustration 丨 Xiaoxiaomei
Visual co-ordination 丨 Cinnamon bark
Special Consultant 丨 Xu
文 丨 Xu、Mi、余雯婷
Editors 丨 Yan Mi, Guan Di, Kevin Ma Ma Ziqian, Xu Lumei
Designed by 丨 Yeer
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