More than 60 artists bring ceramics, textiles, glass, jewellery, furniture and digital technology to Somerset House for Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind, a free exhibition exploring China’s living craft traditions.
Now open as part of London Design Festival 2026, Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind brings together more than 60 artists working across craft, art and design at Somerset House.
Running until 27th September, the exhibition moves from stoneware, ceramics and glass to jewellery, textiles and furniture, with digital and immersive elements appearing throughout. At its centre is the idea that China’s craft heritage isn’t something fixed or preserved in the past, but a living practice that continues to change through new materials, technologies and contemporary ways of thinking.
The exhibition takes its title from the idea of the crafted object as a reflection of the mind. Drawing on Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism, its curatorial framework explores the relationship between maker and material, suggesting that an object can carry something of the thought, attention and inner life involved in making it.
That idea shapes the exhibition through three sections: Clear the Mind, Refine the Mind and Nourish the Mind.
Clear the Mind begins with works inspired by mountains, stones, water and landscape. Forms are kept minimal and materials relatively unembellished, allowing texture, translucency, light and the physical character of the material itself to come forward.
Refine the Mind turns towards making as a process of transformation. Ceremonial vessels, formal garments and ritual tools sit alongside furniture, metalwork and sculpture, connecting the repeated acts of carving, shaping and refining an object with ideas around discipline and the cultivation of the self.
Among the works on show are Zhi Min’s Moon (2023), a large blue ceramic and metal form, and Rosalie Huang’s Ming Yellow Embroidered Wedding Dress with the Pattern of the Twelve Symbols and Auspicious Swastika (2019), which brings together silk jacquard, gold thread, pearl embroidery, Chaozhou Panjin embroidery and weaving. Shuang Xi’s Soft Monolith (2026) combines Xiangyunsha silk, tie-dye, velvet flower ornaments and mixed fibres in a sculptural form.
The final section, Nourish the Mind, moves closer to everyday life, bringing music, opera, food culture and traditional Chinese medicine into the exhibition. Sound, flavour and touch broaden the experience beyond the purely visual, with craft presented as something connected to daily rituals as much as to the gallery or museum.
Materials across the exhibition range from the traditional to the unexpected. Ouyang Wendong’s Silent Coil (2022) is made from mixed incense, while Huang Lu’s Symbiosis of Chrysanthemums II (2026) uses rice-paper plant to create an intricate white sculptural form.
Together, the three sections move from stillness through making and into everyday life, presenting craft as something that can carry cultural memory while continuing to shift in response to contemporary experience.
The London exhibition is the latest chapter of Reviving Craft, an international exhibition series that previously travelled to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris with Five Elements in 2024 and Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan with A Narrative of Social Life in 2025.
For London, the exhibition is curated by Su Dan, Deputy Director of the China National Arts and Crafts Museum and China Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum, and Yang Lan, journalist, curator and Chairperson of Sun Media Group.
With its mix of historic techniques, contemporary design and new technology, Reflection of the Mind makes the case for Chinese craft as something fluid rather than fixed: traditions carried forward through the people still making, adapting and reimagining them.
Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind, 16th–27th September 2026. Somerset House, Free.
Part of London Design Festival 2026.
