From 22nd to 30th October the Dutch Design Week took place in Eindhoven. This major event was concluded by the 2016 graduation show, where a jury of five people proceeded to the election of the best design projects. Amongst the 171 graduates who were participating, the young and promising Chinese designer Jing He won the prize for the most outstanding master project. Her work is directly inspired from one of the most iconic objects of the Dutch culture: a magnificent seventeenth century Delftware flower vase that belongs to the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. With this contemporary pair of pyramids, Jing He intended to explore the questions of creativity, inspiration and identity. As we know, the exceptional inventiveness of the Delft masters was triggered in the seventeenth century by the arrival of Chinese porcelain imported by the VOC (Dutch East India Company). With her creation, Jing He operates the other way round. She explains : “I invited five young Chinese designers from different design disciplines, to reflect the culture and the history of imitation and innovation. They each designed two layers of the pyramid. I claim ownership of the final product together with these five designers, to further explore the intellectual property of this object (…). For a second pyramid, I imitated and mixed up famous Dutch designers’ iconic works with my former works, to question their influence and the institution that formed me.”
With this piece of art, the designer not only connects the Netherlands and the Chinese heritage, but also by doing so, shows the link between past and future.
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