WuMian studio

Visual Identity

    Iconicity as design gesture

After a discussion with jewelry designer Wu Mian, her unique design approach impressed me. Her project did not pursuit beauty results but took a rigorous and logical approach in creating autonomous principles. Besides the design approach, a large number of chemical, physical, and other scientific methods were introduced in the process of jewelry making. The idea of creating general principles rather than once-for-all results and that of making via scientific approaches are both representing the specificity of this jewelry designer. And it is this specificity remains me of alchemists and how they think and work.

The scientific approaches in alchemist's working most likely to emerge in modern people’s cognition: alchemists are often described as the origins of chemists, who try to understand the deep structure of objects and therefore to create the new.

Regarding their ways of thinking, alchemists are regarded as the predecessors of psychologists, who constantly inquiry about the reasons for every human behavior and the general principles behind them. These two factors represent great similarities with how the jewelry designer Wu Mian. In alchemy, both thinking and making are represented by symbolic icons. Therefore, a design vocabulary can be drawn up.

There are four basic elements in alchemy (water, soil, air, and fire), which were considered as the elements constituting the whole world in ancient Greece. I extracted and reconstructed the symbols of these four elements, and thereby formed the initial logo. Based on that and in accordance with the alchemy manufacturing process (i.e., the creation of an object needs to include original materials), I added symbolic signs of gold, silver, mercury, aluminum, and zinc into the integration of water, soil, air, and fire. Thereby, this entire manufacturing process generated an intersection with the design approach of jewelry designer Wu Mian.

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