When I began XU, I was never particularly interested in making something that could simply be described as a “Chinese inspired handbag.”
The phrase has always made me think about a certain kind of design process in which the handbag already exists before the cultural reference arrives. The silhouette is decided, the construction is decided, and then something recognizably Chinese is added so that the association can be understood immediately. It might be a motif, a character, a pattern, a familiar colour combination, or another visual reference that tells the viewer where the inspiration came from.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach, and some of those references can be beautiful and historically meaningful. What interested me, however, was whether the process could begin somewhere deeper.
I wanted to know what would happen if the historical source came first and the contemporary object had to grow from it.
That question eventually became one of the central ideas behind XU. Instead of asking how to make a handbag look Chinese, I began asking what might happen if the forms, proportions, materials, functions, philosophies, and construction logic embedded in Chinese objects were allowed to influence the objects we live with now.
The title of this essay is deliberately speculative because Chinese objects did not, historically, stop evolving.
In many ways, the history itself became evidence for the question.
Chinese makers repeatedly looked backward while creating something that belonged to their own present. Ancient forms were collected, studied, reinterpreted, moved between materials, adapted to new functions, and given different visual identities over time. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's research on Chinese bronzes from the twelfth through nineteenth centuries documents this process particularly clearly. Earlier bronze forms and decorative vocabularies remained important, but later craftspeople were not limited to reproducing them unchanged. Historical shapes could become incense burners, flower vases, scholar's objects, and other forms designed for entirely different circumstances and uses (Lu, 2025).
Learning that changed the way I thought about heritage.
I had once assumed, almost unconsciously, that respecting a historical object meant preserving it as faithfully as possible. The closer the reproduction, the greater the respect seemed to be. The more I researched Chinese material culture, however, the more I encountered evidence that reinterpretation was already part of the history itself.
Objects changed because materials changed. Functions shifted as social circumstances changed. Motifs travelled between different kinds of objects, and older forms could be revisited centuries later by people who understood that they were looking backward while still creating something for their own time.
Even in much earlier Chinese material history, there are examples of forms moving from one medium into another. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that some early bronze vessels developed from shapes with precedents in ceramic traditions. Translating those forms into metal affected what the vessel could become because bronze offered different structural and decorative possibilities from earthenware (Department of Asian Art, 2004).
What interests me about that history is not simply that one material replaced another. It is the idea that a recognizable design language could survive transformation without remaining unchanged.
A form could carry something forward even when the circumstances around it had become different.
That idea became much more useful to me than searching for immediately recognizable symbols.
If an object has already changed across centuries, then preserving its history does not necessarily require choosing one moment and treating that particular version as the final and untouchable form. The more interesting question becomes what allowed the object to remain connected to itself even while its materials, proportions, functions, and contexts changed.
Sometimes that continuity may come from silhouette. Sometimes it may come from balance, construction, proportion, or the way an object occupies space. In other cases, what survives may be less visual and more conceptual, such as the way something opens, contains, protects, presents, or relates to the person using it.
Sometimes the meaning attached to an object may become more important than reproducing its appearance.
That is the level at which I want XU to begin.
The first object that allowed me to test this way of thinking was the ruyi.
The historical 如意 already contains a long history of change. The Palace Museum traces its development from an object related to a practical implement into something increasingly removed from that original function. Across later periods, ruyi became associated with scholars, court culture, auspicious wishes, ceremony, and gifting, while the materials and decorative forms used to make them continued to expand (Palace Museum, n.d.).
The visual language surrounding the ruyi also travelled beyond the sceptre itself. Cloudlike ruyi forms appeared across furniture, porcelain, clothing, paper, and architecture. Once the shape had become culturally recognizable, it could move into entirely different categories while still maintaining a relationship with the object from which the form had developed (Palace Museum, n.d.).
That history changed how I looked at the ruyi.
Instead of seeing a historical object that had reached a final form and then stopped, I began seeing something that had already survived through adaptation.
The Ruyi handbag became my first attempt to continue that conversation.
I did not want to reproduce a historical sceptre in miniature or attach its shape to a conventional handbag as decoration. I wanted to understand which part of the object could survive a complete change in function.
The curve of the historical ruyi became the architectural starting point for the flap. From there, the handbag had to develop around the practical requirements of an entirely different object. It needed to open and close, contain belongings, maintain its structure, sit on a surface, move against the body, and function within contemporary life.
The historical source remained important, but the new function required the design to change.
I explore that process more fully in “From Sceptre to Handbag: How the Ruyi Became Form,” while “As You Wish: Why I Chose the Ruyi First” looks more closely at why the meaning of 如意 made it the object I wanted to begin with. What matters here is the larger principle behind those choices.
For XU, translation cannot mean copying.
If I preserved every historical proportion and detail exactly, I would not necessarily be respecting the original object more deeply. I might simply be producing something that no longer works for the life it is supposed to enter.
I have started to think that respect asks for something more difficult than reproduction. It requires enough research to understand what made the original object distinctive, enough restraint to avoid reducing heritage to decoration, and enough freedom to allow the contemporary object to develop an identity that belongs fully to the present.
That is also why I do not want XU to become a catalogue of historical motifs.
The question should never be reduced to which Chinese object can be turned into a handbag next. What interests me more is the design thinking contained within an object and whether that thinking can survive another transformation.
One historical source may influence silhouette, while another may have very little impact on shape at all. An object might suggest a way of opening, balancing, containing, protecting, stacking, folding, fastening, or occupying space. A material tradition might influence the treatment of a surface or the character of a piece of hardware. A philosophy might shape the relationship between the object and the person using it without ever becoming a visible motif.
The result should therefore be allowed to change from one XU object to another because the source itself has changed.
That possibility gives the brand much more room to grow.
It also means that history can function as design logic rather than simply as a library of decorations.
This way of thinking has changed the way I experience museums.
I used to look at many historical objects as though they were finished things. They belonged to a particular dynasty, they had a date and description beside them, and they seemed to exist within a chapter of history whose ending had already been written.
Now I find myself looking at them differently.
I notice a curve and begin wondering what would happen if it existed at another scale. I look at the way an object stands and try to understand what creates its sense of weight. I look at metalwork and wonder which part of its character would survive if the material changed. I look at something that once belonged to ritual or ceremony and wonder whether the idea underneath it could still matter within an ordinary life centuries later.
The museum object has gradually become less of an endpoint for me and more of the beginning of another question.
That shift has also changed the way I relate to my own cultural history.
For a long time, I was far more fluent in the design languages of European luxury than I was in the languages embedded in Chinese material culture. I knew how to recognize certain silhouettes, houses, materials, and historical references because I had encountered them often enough that the vocabulary felt natural.
Chinese objects did not feel immediately legible to me in the same way.
I could stand in front of something in a museum and recognize that it was historically important without understanding why it looked the way it did, how it had been made, what function it once served, or how later generations responded to it.
Building XU has become part of how I am trying to change that for myself.
The more I research, the less static Chinese material culture becomes. Forms migrated. Materials changed. Meanings accumulated. Techniques developed. Later makers repeatedly looked at earlier objects and decided what deserved to be retained, changed, quoted, or completely reimagined.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Recasting the Past project has been particularly meaningful to me for this reason. Its research on Chinese bronzes from approximately 1100 to 1900 challenges the tendency to understand later objects inspired by ancient bronzes simply as inferior copies. Instead, many of these objects are presented as creative reinterpretations that developed their own functions and aesthetic identities while remaining in conversation with earlier forms (Lu, 2025).
I think there is something important in that idea that extends well beyond bronze.
Heritage can remain connected to the past without requiring each generation to preserve every detail exactly as it was received. Sometimes continuity comes through the willingness to understand something deeply enough that it can enter another context without losing the reason it mattered in the first place.
That is the future I am interested in imagining for XU.
I want a historical reference to be capable of entering contemporary life without asking the person carrying it to dress around it, explain it constantly, or treat it as if it belongs behind museum glass. The object should function naturally in the present, while the history remains available beneath the surface for anyone who becomes curious.
Someone should be able to appreciate the form, proportion, material, function, and craftsmanship of an XU object before they know anything about where the idea began. If curiosity comes afterward, the history should deepen the object rather than become the reason the object is allowed to be beautiful.
That distinction matters because I do not want cultural recognition to become a shortcut.
A design does not need the most immediately recognizable Chinese symbol available in order to carry a relationship with Chinese history. I am more interested in whether the logic of the object can carry that relationship through the way the design itself has been constructed.
That kind of recognition may take longer to build, but I think it creates something much more valuable.
It creates the possibility of a design language rather than a collection of recurring motifs.
Many handbag brands become recognizable through repeated physical codes. A particular closure, quilting pattern, handle, silhouette, or piece of hardware can become so strongly associated with a house that the object can be identified before the logo is visible.
I think XU should eventually become recognizable too, but I do not want that recognition to depend on forcing every future object to repeat the Ruyi.
The Ruyi flap belongs to the Ruyi because of the historical object from which it developed. The carving belongs to the same conversation. If I carried those details into every future XU handbag regardless of the new source, they would eventually lose the very reason they were meaningful in the first place.
For XU, the deeper design language is the method of translation itself.
History provides the source, but the essence of that source determines what should remain.
The visible result may therefore change dramatically from one object to another. One handbag may be structured while another is softer. One may depend heavily on surface work while another may contain almost no ornament. One historical source may become recognizable through silhouette, while another may influence construction, mechanism, proportion, material, or philosophy instead.
What should connect them is the standard of thought behind the object.
The research happens before the decoration. The historical source is studied before it is translated. Form, material, function, context, and meaning are considered together. The distinction between documented history and contemporary interpretation remains clear, and the final object still has to work completely in the present even if the person carrying it never learns the story.
That is what I eventually want people to recognize about XU.
I do not want someone to identify an XU handbag only because every object looks alike. I want the objects to feel related because they came from the same way of thinking.
The family resemblance should live in the approach.
This is also where design language and construction standard become two related but separate ideas.
The source of each XU handbag may change, and therefore the visible expression of the design may change with it. The expectations surrounding how carefully the object is resolved should remain much more consistent.
The historical artifact or philosophy provides the beginning of the design language, while The XU Standard governs what happens when that idea becomes a physical handbag. Materials still need to be appropriate for their function. Hardware needs to operate smoothly. Structural areas need to be considered deliberately. Stitching, reinforcement, plating, finishing, hidden construction, and inspection all need to meet the expectations established for the object.
History may determine why a handbag looks different from the one before it, but attention to construction should never depend on which historical source inspired the design.
That separation gives XU room to evolve without allowing evolution to become inconsistency.
The Ruyi is therefore Chapter One rather than the template for everything that follows.
It is the first time I have taken an object from Chinese history, followed the questions contained within its form and meaning, and allowed those questions to become something carried in contemporary life.
What comes after it should begin somewhere else because the source should be allowed to ask a different set of questions.
The larger method, however, can remain.
I want to know what happens when historical Chinese objects are treated not only as things to preserve, display, or reference decoratively, but also as design languages capable of producing new ideas.
For me, carrying history forward does not always mean preserving exactly what we found.
Sometimes it means studying something closely enough to understand what made it matter, and then allowing that understanding to continue into a form that could only belong to the present.