Dionysian City

A chain hangs in the air like a small piece of skyline, catching a cold blink of streetlight. Its weight announces itself before meaning does: a pull at the collarbone, a line drawn between throat and pavement. From afar, the necklace reads like a transit map—clean, continuous, almost infrastructural. Up close, its links turn tactile, carrying the scraped patience of handwork and the blunt memory of city edges. The confrontation is immediate: intimacy meeting metropolis. This is not infrastructure or adornment, but infrastructure and adornment mutually generating each other. In Dionysian City, Mingxuan frames jewellery as a wearable installation, arguing that…

The project begins as fieldwork rather than styling. Mingxuan studies London as a set of districts and systems—where circulation, surveillance, leisure, and shelter each script a different emotional weather—then translates those impressions into six chain necklaces. Material becomes method: choosing, testing, and assembling elements until each piece holds the character of a place without illustrating it. Form follows behaviour. The chains loop, hinge, and segment like conduits and crossings, allowing the body to carry an urban diagram without becoming signage. Worn on the move, the work asks the wearer to renegotiate pace: to notice thresholds, corners, and the sudden comfort of a familiar route. The city’s pressure is made portable, then softened by contact with skin.

Concrete, aluminium, and steel are not quoted literally; they are re-staged as sensibilities. Hardness shows up as blunt surfaces and industrial proportions, while refinement appears in the precision of joins, the measured shine of metal, and the careful calibration of weight. Mingxuan’s metalworking turns “grit” into something that can be handled, read, and trusted. Each necklace operates like a personal sensor: it warms, shifts, and lightly resists, reminding the wearer that the urban environment is not neutral but always negotiating with the body. Here, elegance does not erase roughness; it allows roughness to speak without becoming costume.

The title’s Dionysian charge—set against an Apollonian taste for order—is less about excess than permeability: how the city seeps into identity through rhythm, noise, proximity. By spotlighting overlooked infrastructure as a site of poetry, the collection offers belonging without nostalgia, an attachment built from attention. The viewer is not asked to escape London, but to inhabit it deliberately, with jewellery acting as a prompt. In the end, meaning returns to matter: a single link flashes, and the boundary between street and self briefly glows.