Sweet Coffin

XIAO Lan built this one on the idea that death arrives as an embrace, and that the place worth returning to is home.

The blend is dusty and rotten-woody, with nutmeg running throughout. Willow bark, apricot, moldy cedarwood and dead water fill in around it. The molds are suffocating and the texture is dark. The ambience it leaves is comforting, though not very lively.

TOMBSTONE works from a single object, the marker left behind and inscribed by other hands. A grave marker is a shared human ritual, a structure standing for reflection and continuation, and this house resists the inscription, so no one gets to define a life. Every bottle is handcrafted. Each cap is carved from natural marble with its own earth-formed pattern, no two ever the same, and the bottles carry no words at all.

The work begins from a gaze toward mortality. The house sets out to unlearn the ornamental myths that have gathered around death, and to celebrate the beauty and intensity of being human. Five works make up the line, each one a personal reflection on the inevitable, made with no preset story and no budget ceiling. The results are rich and powerful, and original without apology.