Between the hand and the screen
Yingqi “Puffy” Zhao is a contemporary jeweler and the designer of Wanlie License, the studio's jewelry label. She is co-founder of the Wanlie Project artist platform.
After completing her MFA in Metalsmithing and Jewelry Design at Indiana University Bloomington, Zhao shaped her creative experiments into Wanlie License, which began in 2020 to create playful sculptural objects on the body and debuted in 2022.
The work is a push and pull between “making sure all surfaces are 100% parallel to one another” and “breaking every single pattern to find peace in chaos” — a daily ritual of inputting stimulus, emotion and memory while outputting wearable art. It explores inspiring odds and ends, the balance of hard surface and soft line, and the dynamic between the wearer and the object.
The studio now extends the same thinking beyond the bench: into 3D modeling and printing, digital art, and interactive tools built with code.
Wanlie / ˈwanlie /
noun 1.the quality of being playful.
noun 2.throwing-chestnut-towards-the-sky goose.
Wanlie is …
- translucent green, metallic gray, iridescent sheen;
- caged gem, wire & solid, portal of parallel dimension;
- today’s fiction, tomorrow’s anthropology, experiment log;
- 50% wakefulness, one cup of sleep talk, routine brain walk.