qīqíqǐqì Studio is a creative platform grounded in material practice and critical cultural inquiry, using natural lacquer as its guiding thread. We focus on the agency of lacquer and how materials actively shape creative processes and the formation of form.
Through this lens, we explore how material itself can activate perception and generate alternative modes of narration. This perspective also opens up new ways of rethinking normative aesthetics, hierarchies, and established narrative frameworks.
Building on this research, we seek to translate our explorations into objects for everyday use, allowing lacquer to return to lived experience. Through these works, we hope to awaken tactile memory and re-engage embodied modes of perception, reconnecting material, body, and daily life.
TEAM MEMBERS
Miao Tan ARWS
Artist
Within qīqíqǐqì Studio, Miao Tan leads the studio’s material practice and artistic creation, these also extend into material research and critical writing.
With a background in painting and sculpture, she has a high sensitivity to materials. Her practice is grounded in intuitive interaction with materials, responding to their tactility, movement, and unpredictability. Texture, weight, and structural behaviour act as generative forces that participate in and shape the gradual formation of each object. For her, making is a living, ongoing process. Each work unfolds through direct interaction, with form continually negotiated through action, failure, and adjustment.
Miao was educated in both China and the UK, holding a BA in Oil Painting from Minzu University of China and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (RCA). She is an Associate Member of the Royal Watercolour Society (ARWS) and a recipient of the 2023 New Graduate Award.
Contact: miaotan1998@gmail.com
Siying Cui
Visual Direction
Siying is responsible for the visual, spatial, and discursive articulation of the studio’s practice.
Drawing on her background in branding and spatial design, Siying develops qīqíqǐqì’s visual language and perceptual structures, including graphic systems and forms of communication. Through careful attention to scale, distance, and rhythm, she organises objects within coherent perceptual frameworks across both physical space and printed media, allowing the work to be approached and understood with greater clarity and sensorial presence.
Siying holds a BA in Environmental Design from Beijing University of Technology and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art. She has worked in brand design, book design, and spatial design, and her practice moves across design and art, maintaining an open and flexible approach between the two.
Contact: siyingcui1230@gmail.com