Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind is a landmark exhibition that explores physical works of art and design as mirrors of the true mind. Featuring more than 60 artists – with works spanning stoneware, ceramics, glass, jewellery, textiles, and furniture – the exhibition traces China’s living craft heritage not as a preserved artefact but as an active, evolving conversation between tradition and contemporary design practice. Alongside this, digital and immersive elements are woven throughout, recontextualising heritage techniques through modern technology and imagination.
The exhibition Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind is part of a wider global initiative entitled Reviving Craft – Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Design. To date, this has included projects in Paris, Milan and now also London. The exhibition opens to the public at Somerset House on 16 September. Free to visit, it runs until 27 September.
This exhibition explores what craft means – culturally, philosophically, and materially. Rooted in Eastern thought, it draws on Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism to propose that objects are reflections of the mind: not simply made, but thought into existence, carrying the inner life of their maker. Rather than separating aesthetic experience from intellectual or spiritual exploration, the exhibition offers a different way of looking, one that challenges assumptions about the relationship between maker, object, and viewer.
Structured around three inward states – Chengxin (clearing the mind), Xiuxin (refining the mind), and Yangxin (nourishing the mind) – the exhibition moves through stillness, discipline and the sustaining rhythms of daily life. It champions the idea that craft is not a relic of the past nor a luxury of the present, but instead a practice of becoming. As such it becomes an invitation, to encounter, through objects, something of your own true nature.
