Qiang Feng

I am Qiang 嫱, a Chinese multi-disciplinary designer and researcher within Colour, Material and Finish (CMF), Communication Design and Branding.

I have participated in many interior projects such as for Danzhai Jin and Crowne Plaza Wuxi. In these projects, I curated sensual experiences, balancing aesthetics with function. In the hotel project Danzhai Jin, I thoroughly researched the indigenous culture of Hmong, in which the worship of nature plays a great role. I showed my respect and support for indigenous culture and local community by making the best use of traditional crafts such as indigo-dyed fabric and hand-made bird-cages. These past experiences furnished me with sophisticated knowledge about the relationship between art, craft and culture, which has led to my more comprehensive study of archaeology, especially the connection between human sensation and the material world.

At the RCA, I have focused on our most underrated sense – smell – and worked with perfumers from ISCIPCA to make scents that might be seen, touched, heard, and even created imaginary scents such as that of the MOON. Film, photography, painting, and craft are now my main approaches to non-verbal communication. Fundamentally I explore how our human sensations interact with the material world, and bring immaterial language to the CMF context.

I use a poetic and aesthetic way of storytelling to create multisensory experience and evoke universal emotions, “…teaches human beings how to become more human.”

A Diary of Small Moments

The Sunrises and moonsets,

The blooming and the falling

The ebbing and the flowing

……

The traces of time are similar no matter whether in London or Beijing.

These traces are collected in this diary which is a container of memory and mood as well as a collage of time and space during my one-year’s journey in the UK. All these tiny, subtle, very ordinary details of life are twinkling in this diary.

When you open this diary, every episode will give you different sensual experiences: you can follow the gaze of an old man by the sea to the distant horizon; you can touch the delicate and empty veins of leaves feeling their life slowly drifting away; you can even smell the scents of the MOON created by my “soft” friend, also a talented perfumer, Marina Moroz.

I invite you to the small moments of my everyday life. Maybe you will also find your small moments here?

Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling: they are all our approaches for building an intimate relationship with the world around us. When we begin to connect to our life consciously, we will realise that the most beautiful, the most precious moment is in the PRESENT.