Qian JingGraphic Designer & Founder of MEWShe graduated from the Department of Visual Design at the China Academy of Art, and later pursued advanced studies in France at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, where she obtained a Master’s degree in Visual Design. In 2006, she completed a six-month exchange program at the Department of Plastic Arts, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in Germany.

Navigating between Eastern and Western cultural education and living environments, Qian Jing has been constantly exploring a visual language that can express her unique personality. Amid the blurring of identities and the disappearance of geographical boundaries, she focuses more on the visual language itself—those unexpected, incidental, humorous, random and unbalanced details of daily life are the motivation and source of inspiration for her creations.

While collaborating with numerous artists, galleries, art festivals, museums and commercial brands on graphic visual design projects, she founded the handwoven carpet brand MEW in 2016. She aspires to connect traditional craftsmanship, new functionality of carpets, and environmental awareness through a more interesting, unexpected and boundaryless experimental approach, with contemporary graphic visual language as the bridge.

MEW

MEW is a young and cutting-edge handwoven carpet brand. Since its inception, MEW has been committed to connecting the independence of graphic design with the functionality of carpets in a more engaging, surprising and boundaryless way, while preserving traditional craftsmanship. It aims to bring a brand-new concept and unique experience to a new generation of young carpet lovers and collectors.

All MEW products are entirely handwoven by master craftsmen from India, Nepal and China, with full respect for the time and effort the artisans invest in every step and process of production. The brand selects 100% natural materials including New Zealand wool, silk, bamboo silk, banana silk and cotton, and adopts various traditional handcraft techniques such as hand-knotting, hand-weaving, hand-shuttle weaving and hand-tufting. MEW is dedicated to exploring the endless possibilities of blending and contrasting different natural materials.

Materials

100% recycled stock New Zealand pure wool

Dimensions

1700 x 2200 mm

During my research and work at hand-weaving workshops in India, Nepal, Xizang, and Inner Mongolia, I have always been struck by the elaborate, jumbled stacks of stock wool in a riot of colours stored in their warehouses, and have long felt an urge to put these discarded wool materials to good use. When researching the theme of Coloring for this project at the Rong Design Library, I refined this idea: the goal is to design a series of "unfinalizable" patterns that can flexibly and randomly adapt to the stock wool colour palettes of each workshop, thus creating a collection of zero-dye handwoven carpets. This approach eliminates water pollution caused by chemical agents in the dyeing process, while also cutting down on the tedious procedures of dye sampling and proofing.

In the course of my colour research, I discovered that black and white are the purest hues—black, in particular, is the colour that lends depth and hue variation to all other shades. To allow all colours to appear and alternate at random in my design, I first defined abstract graphic forms for the "unfinalizable" design to facilitate the substitution of stock wool colours. I then created large black-and-white motifs as the foundational graphic structure, which are paired with wool in "random" and "replaceable" stock colours.