YUNQI ZHANG
CHINESE, BORN 6TH JUNE 1994
CURE
Traditional Chinese medicine believes that people’s diseases arise from the body’s meridian blockage and that pain derives from it. Most traditional medical therapies use this principle to treat patients. In acupuncture for instance the needles work to unblock the human body through the epidermal surface. Yunqi’s acupuncture pieces start from the idea of the pearl: it represents the shell’s reaction to a disease - a grain of sand - that needs to be cured. At the same time, pearls are a common language in jewellery. The same kind of research went in her cupping pieces. Cupping with fire is one of the most traditional Chinese medical treatments, literally meant to suck out toxins from the human body. Yunqi combined it with the shape of viruses to come up with forms that express a new aesthetic code in jewellery design