Yiwei Xu

Yiwei Xu is a jewellery artist from China. He received his Bachelor's degree in Jewellery Design from the Beijing Institute of Fashion in 2021 and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Jewellery and Metals at the Royal College of Art. In his current practice, he focuses on the interactivity and cross-border collaboration of jewellery, especially the use of smart technology in jewellery. He combines the aesthetic appeal and craftsmanship of traditional jewellery with the innovation of smart technology to make jewellery interact with its wearer, its environment or other devices. Thus creating a unique interactive experience and experimenting with intelligence to convey emotions.

This series of works is based on Yiwei's question: What is the dream world of congenitally blind people like? In their dreams, they only have the senses of touch, hearing and other senses other than sight. Yiwei uses the dream world of the congenitally blind as the main element, and uses jewellery as a medium to investigate the relationship between vision and other senses. Although vision is an important tool for us to experience the world, today we are exposed to artificial, carefully curated images and visual stimuli that limit our perception of the world and lead to a biased and narrow understanding of objects and cultures. So visual experience is not the only way we experience displays; we should pay attention to our other senses.

So Yiwei combined invisible surrealism and related elements such as blindness in his design. To conceal the visual influence, he uses Musou Black paint and lacquer to create "visible" and "invisible" spaces, creating a contrast between the visual and the tactile and auditory senses. As a result, the viewer needs to feel the "invisible" part through touch and interact with it through the built-in sensor chip.

Yiwei's work aims to simulate the dream experience of congenitally blind individuals, exploring the limitations of vision and encouraging the viewer to engage with other senses to perceive and experience art. It also combines smart technology with contemporary jewellery, using intelligence to convey emotions.