Wen Fang

Prosperity Brought by the Dragon and the Phoenix (Design)

Christmas Day 2011 is coming soon and the baby in my belly is already seven months old. Lucy called me, telling me that a new store in Beijing’s Shin Kong Place was going to open and she asked me if I had any good ideas for a Christmas tree design. Two days later, I handed her some sketches of a Christmas tree I called “Prosperity Brought by the Dragon and the Phoenix.” As most knows, 2012 is Chinese dragon year. I find that, although there are many creative Christmas trees in the world, there is seldom a Christmas design combining eastern and western traditional cultures. In China, speaking of Christmas Day, it is essentially based on “worshipping everything western.” Yet for me, just like Chinese Spring Festival, Christmas Day is a traditional family festival. Shin Kong Place is an important business center in Beijing. How I hoped to make Chinese people realize the charm of our traditional culture with a special design, even though they are celebrating a foreign festival! So, this time, I fearlessly used the 6500-year-old pattern of Tsing Lung (Qing Long or Black Dragon) and Zhuque (Red Phoenix) as the design element. As most people know, the Black Dragon and the Red Phoenix are the ancestors of the Chinese dragon-phoenix culture. So this design is called the “Christmas tree of Prosperity Brought by the Dragon and the Phoenix.” In the design, I also combined elements of the Dior brand’s gold color, J’adore perfume, Lady Dior handbags, and Dior’s emblematic woven patterns to complete this crossover work between business and art, and also between China, France, and other countries.

Artificial traveler’s banana tree, paint, white sand