When I first began developing the surface of the Ruyi, I knew that I did not want the historical reference to exist only in the silhouette.
The curve of the flap had already grown from the form of the ruyi itself, but the surface still felt unresolved. I could have left the leather completely smooth, printed a pattern onto it, or added something decorative after the structure of the handbag was finished. Instead, I kept returning to the idea of working directly into the leather.
I wanted the surface itself to carry the design.
That eventually became the carved leather of the Ruyi.
The more I researched carving as a material practice, however, the more careful I became about how I described that decision. I do not want to suggest that carved leather handbags were an ancient Chinese tradition that XU is now reviving. I have not found evidence that would justify that claim, and the history of decorated leather belongs to many cultures and techniques far beyond China.
What interests me is something more specific.
Leather has its own long history of being tooled, stamped, incised, embossed, moulded, and otherwise worked so that decoration becomes physically embedded in its surface. At the same time, Chinese material culture contains an extraordinary history of artists working into materials themselves, whether through the abrasion and incision of jade, inscriptions cut into bone, decoration worked into metal, or the extraordinarily labour intensive tradition of carved lacquer.
XU brings those two histories into a contemporary conversation.
When I use the phrase carved leather, I am therefore using it as a broad contemporary description rather than suggesting that every historical technique used to decorate leather was technically the same form of carving.
Museum collections use a much more precise vocabulary. Historical leather objects may be described as tooled, stamped, embossed, incised, moulded, cut, gilded, or some combination of those techniques. These processes alter leather in different ways, but what they share is the possibility of treating the surface as something that can be physically worked rather than merely covered.
Leather has been used this way for centuries across very different cultures.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves fourteenth century leather bookbindings attributed to Egypt and Syria whose surfaces were stamped and tooled. Islamic book arts developed highly sophisticated traditions of leather decoration, with geometric and vegetal designs produced through tooling, stamping, moulds, gilding, cut leather, and other methods. By the fifteenth century, Persian binding traditions had developed complex medallion compositions that later spread into Ottoman and Indian book arts (Sardar, 2003).
European leatherwork developed its own approaches. Surviving medieval and Renaissance objects include protective cases, bookbindings, boxes, and other functional objects made from leather that was moulded, incised, stamped, or tooled. A Venetian leather box from around 1490 in the Metropolitan Museum's collection, for example, is described as incised, tooled, and stamped leather, while other surviving European objects use cuir bouilli, a method in which leather was softened and formed before being further decorated (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.-a).
There is therefore no single history of “carved leather” moving neatly from one place or period to another.
There are many histories of people discovering that leather could hold a mark.
That is the part I find compelling.
Leather begins as a relatively continuous surface, but once it is cut, pressed, tooled, stamped, or carved, the material begins to hold evidence of intervention. Light catches differently across the raised and recessed areas. A line is no longer only a drawing of a line because it has acquired depth. Ornament becomes something that can be felt as well as seen.
The decoration becomes part of the material rather than something resting entirely on top of it.
That relationship between surface and meaning began leading me back toward Chinese material culture.
One of the earliest examples that fascinated me was jade.
Jade has an extraordinarily long history in China, but the word carving can actually make the process sound easier than it was. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that Neolithic jade was too hard simply to carve with a knife. Craftspeople instead shaped and decorated it through laborious abrasion using coarse sands, producing remarkably fine incised lines and polished surfaces. Liangzhu jades in particular demonstrate a level of precision that required considerable technical skill and patience (Department of Asian Art, 2004a).
I find that distinction important because what interests me is not simply the appearance of a carved pattern.
It is the decision to alter the material itself in order to create the image.
The maker could not separate the decoration from the physical properties of the jade. The resistance of the material, the tools available, the amount of labour required, and the final surface were all part of the same object.
Jade continued to hold ceremonial, aesthetic, and social importance through later Chinese history. By the Shang and Zhou periods, jade objects participated in sacrificial offerings, burial rites, court ceremonies, and other formal contexts, while jade working inherited and developed techniques established much earlier (Department of Asian Art, 2004b).
None of this means that the carved leather on a Ruyi handbag reproduces jade working, because the materials and techniques are completely different.
What jade gave me was another way of thinking about the relationship between ornament and material.
The image does not have to sit on the surface.
The surface itself can become the image.
Oracle bones led me toward a different aspect of the same idea.
Beginning around the late second millennium BCE, inscriptions associated with Shang royal divination were scratched onto animal bones and turtle shells. These inscriptions recorded questions and divinatory activities of the royal court and are among the earliest surviving forms of Chinese writing (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.-b).
I want to be careful about romanticizing that history because oracle bones were not decorative objects made simply to demonstrate the beauty of incision. Their markings existed within a specific ritual and political system, and their historical significance today extends far beyond their appearance.
What stayed with me was the physical act of inscription.
Information was not floating independently from the material that held it. Someone physically marked a surface, and thousands of years later those marks remain evidence that an event, question, or decision once occurred.
The material became a bearer of memory.
That idea has followed human making far beyond oracle bones, of course, and it belongs to many cultures rather than China alone. Yet within the material history I was beginning to study for XU, it made me increasingly aware of how often meaning had been cut, engraved, cast, painted, woven, inlaid, or carved into the things people made.
Chinese carved lacquer brought that idea even closer to the Ruyi.
Lacquer had been used in China for centuries before carved lacquer emerged as a distinct luxury art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art traces lacquer use in China into the Neolithic period and notes that incised decoration was already used during the Han dynasty. Later techniques developed in different directions, including engraved gold, filled decoration, and eventually carved lacquer (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004).
Carved lacquer became particularly significant from around the twelfth century onward. Rather than simply carving a wooden object and covering it afterward, craftspeople built many layers of lacquer over a substructure and then carved into the accumulated lacquer itself. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that some objects required thirty or thirty five layers and occasionally far more, creating enough material depth for elaborate geometric patterns, flowers, landscapes, figures, and narrative scenes to be carved into the surface (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009).
This is one of the Chinese material traditions that feels most relevant to the way I think about the Ruyi, although the relationship remains an interpretation rather than a claim of direct continuity.
The Ruyi is made from leather, not lacquer.
The technique is different.
The historical context is different.
What connects them for me is the treatment of surface as something with depth.
A carved lacquer object does not need an image printed over it to create visual richness because the material itself becomes capable of carrying ornament. Light moves across recessed and raised surfaces, and the time required to build and work those surfaces becomes part of the finished object.
That way of thinking helped clarify why carved leather felt so natural on the Ruyi.
I did not want to place a cloud pattern over the handbag as though the leather were merely a background.
I wanted the cloud language to enter the leather.
The cloud forms associated with the ruyi could then exist through changes in depth, shadow, edge, and touch. As the handbag moves through different light, the carving can become more or less visible. Someone can notice the pattern from a distance and then discover another level of detail when they come closer.
That relationship with distance feels important to XU.
I have never wanted cultural reference to depend entirely on instant recognition.
The Ruyi does not need someone to identify a historical sceptre from across a room. Its history becomes available gradually. The curve may be noticed first, the carving later, and the meaning behind those decisions only after someone becomes curious enough to ask.
Carved leather works particularly well within that philosophy because it rewards looking closely.
It creates something tactile without requiring a logo to explain why the surface matters.
There is another reason I wanted to work this way.
Modern manufacturing gives designers countless ways to place an image onto leather. A pattern can be printed, coated, transferred, embroidered, embossed, lasered, or otherwise reproduced with extraordinary consistency. There are good reasons to use any of those methods depending on what the object requires.
For the Ruyi, however, I became interested in what happened when the pattern felt inseparable from the surface itself.
The cloud carving should not feel like a graphic that could simply be deleted and replaced with another pattern next season.
It belongs because the source object led there.
This returns to one of the questions I keep asking throughout XU: if I remove the historical reference, does anything important about the object change?
With the Ruyi, the answer should be yes.
Removing the historical source would change the flap. It would change the carving. It would change the meaning of the name. It would change the colours and material references that developed around the handbag.
That is what makes the carving more than ornament for me.
Its beauty still matters, because I do not think meaning excuses bad design. The cloud forms have to work compositionally across the flap, interact with the silhouette, catch light in a way that feels deliberate, and leave enough space for the leather itself to remain visible.
This is one reason the carving went through so many variations.
More detail did not automatically make the design more meaningful. Some compositions became too dense. Others felt too literal. Some were beautiful drawings but became distracting once translated onto the actual handbag.
Eventually I had to stop asking how much carving I could fit onto the surface and start asking how much the surface actually needed.
That process reinforced something that has become increasingly important to XU.
Historical research should create design decisions, but the finished object still needs editing.
A historical source can provide hundreds of possible references, and using all of them would not demonstrate greater understanding. Often understanding gives you enough confidence to use less.
The same principle applies to the history behind carved leather.
I do not need to claim that the Ruyi continues an ancient Chinese leather carving tradition in order for the technique to belong to XU.
The actual story is more interesting.
Decorated leather has its own long and geographically varied history. Chinese material culture has its own extraordinary traditions of carving, abrasion, incision, engraving, and working in relief. XU exists in the present, where I am able to study both and decide what kind of relationship between them makes sense for the object I am designing.
For the Ruyi, carving became a way of taking a contemporary leather handbag and allowing the material itself to carry part of the historical conversation.
That is a nod to Chinese material culture, but I want to be precise about what kind of nod it is.
I am not claiming that carving leather is inherently Chinese.
I am responding to a much broader pattern I kept encountering while studying Chinese objects: the willingness to ask material to hold meaning physically.
Jade could carry form through abrasion and incision. Oracle bones could carry writing through marks cut into bone and shell. Bronze could carry elaborate relief and inscriptions through casting and finishing. Lacquer could be built into layers deep enough to become a carved surface in its own right.
These practices belong to different periods, functions, techniques, and social contexts, and they should not be collapsed into one generalized idea of “ancient Chinese carving.”
What connects them within my own design thinking is much narrower.
The material was allowed to participate in the meaning of the object.
That is what I want from leather.
I do not want the Ruyi to use leather simply because leather is expected of a handbag at its price or because the word leather communicates luxury. I want to keep asking what the material itself can contribute to the design.
Full grain leather gave me one answer because I wanted the natural grain surface to remain part of the object.
Carving gives me another because the surface can also hold form.
Those ideas belong together.
The natural grain reminds me that the leather existed before the design was imposed upon it, while the carving records the deliberate decisions that came afterward. One preserves something already present in the material, and the other introduces something new.
The surface becomes a meeting point between material and design.
I think that is why I kept returning to carved leather even when it made the Ruyi more complicated to manufacture.
There were easier ways to decorate the handbag.
Ease was never the question I was trying to answer.
The question was whether the technique belonged to the object.
For the Ruyi, I believe it does because the carving allows history to enter the handbag without requiring the handbag to imitate a historical artifact. The cloud language survives, the material changes, the function changes, and what emerges belongs completely to the present.
That is XU's larger design method in miniature.
I also do not want carved leather to become a compulsory signature that every future XU handbag must repeat.
If the next historical source has no reason to produce a carved surface, forcing clouds or relief onto it simply because customers begin recognizing carved leather as XU would undermine the philosophy behind the technique.
The Ruyi is carved because its own history led me there.
Another object may lead somewhere completely different.
What I want to carry forward is the willingness to let the source determine the material language rather than requiring every source to conform to an established brand decoration.
That is why the carving matters to me.
Its purpose is not to make a handbag look ancient, nor to recreate a technique from one specific historical object.
It comes from a longer curiosity about what happens when a material is asked to carry more than colour.
Across very different histories, humans have cut, pressed, engraved, abraded, and carved surfaces because sometimes a mark becomes more powerful when it exists physically inside the object that holds it.
For the first XU handbag, I wanted to explore that idea through leather.
The Ruyi begins with history, but the carving does not attempt to return the handbag to the past.
It allows the past to leave a physical impression on something new.