For most of my life, I knew what a beautiful handbag was supposed to look like long before I ever stopped to ask who had taught me.
I knew the names of the French houses and the Italian ones. I knew which silhouettes were considered timeless, which leathers were desirable, which forms signaled refinement, and which logos were discreet enough to suggest that the person carrying them understood something that did not need to be explained. I knew that certain bags represented taste, history, craftsmanship, status, or restraint, even when nobody had ever formally taught me to think about them that way.
I had simply absorbed it.
Taste is often described as though it were entirely personal, but so much of what we consider beautiful is learned through repetition. We encounter the same objects, references, houses, silhouettes, materials, and stories often enough that they begin to feel natural. Eventually, we stop noticing that we learned them at all.
Certain objects become cultural shorthand. A particular clasp, monogram, silhouette, quilting pattern, or shade of leather can communicate an entire world to someone who recognizes it. Part of the pleasure comes from that recognition. You understand what you are looking at without needing anyone to explain it, and the fact that you understand becomes part of the experience itself.
For a long time, I never questioned why I had become fluent in those references.
Then I began spending more time looking at objects from Chinese history and realized how uneven that fluency was.
I could recognize the codes of European luxury almost instinctively, yet I could walk through a museum filled with Chinese objects and know very little about what I was seeing. I might recognize something as jade, porcelain, lacquer, bronze, or calligraphy, but I often did not understand why a particular form had developed, what a certain proportion meant, what an object had been used for, or why its design had persisted across centuries.
That difference began to bother me.
It was not because Chinese material culture lacked the qualities I had been taught to admire elsewhere. There were ritual bronzes created thousands of years ago with remarkable control of proportion and metalwork. There were jade objects whose forms and meanings survived across generations. There were ceramics, textiles, lacquerware, furniture, architectural elements, scrolls, ceremonial objects, and everyday tools that contained sophisticated systems of form, symbolism, material, and construction.
The problem was not an absence of design language.
The problem was that I had learned to recognize some histories as design language more easily than others.
I had spent years becoming familiar with the visual vocabulary of European luxury before learning how to read the objects connected to my own cultural history. Refinement had become associated with a particular set of references, and I had absorbed that association so completely that it had once seemed neutral.
The more I noticed it, the more questions followed.
I began wondering why fluency in certain European design histories could function almost universally as a sign of sophistication, while Chinese historical references were often understood primarily as traditional, ornamental, ceremonial, or culturally specific. A centuries old European reference could be reinterpreted in fashion and still feel contemporary, while a Chinese reference could easily be treated as though its only choices were to remain historical or become decorative.
That difference became increasingly difficult for me to ignore because it raised a larger question about what happens when we repeatedly see some cultural histories translated into contemporary life while others are most often preserved behind glass.
When an object continues appearing in fashion, architecture, interiors, jewelry, and visual culture, people continue learning how to recognize it. Its history remains active because it keeps being interpreted.
When an object is primarily encountered as something historical, it becomes easier to think of it as belonging only to the past.
This realization changed the way I wanted to approach XU.
I did not want to design a conventional handbag and then search for a Chinese motif that could make it feel culturally specific. I did not want heritage to become something added at the end of the process, and I was not interested in using familiar symbols simply because they would make the reference immediately legible.
I wanted to begin much earlier.
I wanted to begin with the object itself.
Instead of asking how a Chinese symbol could decorate a handbag, I wanted to ask what would happen if the original object influenced the structure of the handbag from the beginning. I wanted to understand its proportions, function, material history, meaning, construction, and the reason its form had developed in the first place.
From there, I could ask what might survive translation.
Perhaps a curve could become a flap. Perhaps the logic of a form could influence a silhouette. Perhaps an object's meaning could shape the name of a bag. Perhaps its material history could affect the choice of leather, metal, carving, proportion, or surface.
The goal was not to make something look historical.
The goal was to understand the history well enough that it could become contemporary.
That distinction became one of the most important parts of XU.
I do not believe cultural identity needs to announce itself through the most immediately recognizable symbols available. A handbag does not need dragons, lanterns, calligraphy, or a particular colour palette in order to have a meaningful relationship with Chinese culture. Those things can all have value in the right context, but they are not the only visual vocabulary available to us.
What interested me much more was the possibility of beginning with the deeper design logic contained in historical objects and asking how that logic might continue evolving.
The first answer became the Ruyi.
Its starting point was not a handbag trend or a decorative motif. It was the 如意, a historical object whose form, name, and meaning had already changed across centuries. I began with the object and asked which parts of its identity could remain recognizable even if it became something completely different.
The result was never intended to look ancient.
I wanted it to feel as though the history behind it had remained alive long enough to arrive in the present.
That idea matters to me because cultures are not only preserved through repetition. They also remain alive through interpretation.
If every historical object must remain visually unchanged in order to be respected, then heritage becomes something we observe rather than something we continue participating in. I became much more interested in the possibility that respect could also involve studying an object carefully enough to understand what can evolve without becoming meaningless.
That is the way I want XU to approach Chinese material culture.
I want the reference to exist beneath the object rather than being applied to its surface. I want someone to be able to appreciate the bag without knowing its history, while allowing another person to look more closely and discover why the proportions, carving, hardware, or name exist in the form that they do.
Over time, I hope that process creates another kind of recognition.
I do not want someone to recognize XU only because the logo appears in the same place on every handbag. I want the design language itself to become familiar. I want the shapes, material choices, carved surfaces, hardware, proportions, and the way historical objects are translated into contemporary forms to become recognizable enough that someone can understand what they are looking at before they read the name.
That kind of recognition takes time because it has to be learned.
Perhaps that is part of the point.
The design references we now consider obvious were not always obvious. We learned them through repetition, exposure, storytelling, museums, fashion, advertising, family, media, and the objects we repeatedly saw treated as worthy of attention.
Taste does not appear from nowhere. It is taught, reinforced, circulated, and inherited.
Once I understood that, I became less interested in asking whether Chinese historical references already fit neatly inside an established definition of luxury.
I became more interested in what might happen if we gave ourselves enough time to learn another visual language.
Perhaps sophistication does not need to belong permanently to the references we already know. Perhaps something can feel unfamiliar simply because we have not yet been taught how to see it.
For me, that is one of the reasons XU exists.
I spent years learning how to recognize the histories carried by other people's objects. Now I want to learn how to recognize the histories carried by my own, and I want to understand them deeply enough that they can keep changing.
The question is no longer simply what tasteful design is supposed to look like.
I am much more interested in understanding who taught us to recognize it in the first place, which histories we have been trained to see as sophisticated, and what becomes possible when we learn to look again.