At the core of the Rosewood Beijing’s art programme lies an association with younger generation artists innovating ancient Chinese artistic legacies most eloquently and deeply in China today. When PAA designed the collection for Rosewood Beijing, our premise was to examine how guests could engage with a vast span of Chinese cultural history and how it can speak to our own time through new techniques, new collaborations and new contexts. Further, we sought to uncover how Western artists have been influenced by Chinese culture spread through the ages and all over the world, most notably through ceramics and calligraphy. The Rosewood Beijing Collection has at its core therefore a prevalence of works by contemporary calligraphers, both Chinese and Western and whom we commissioned in collaborative works, and ink brush artists engaged in fine ‘gong bi’ brush and ‘shui mo’ ink wash works, just as their forebears thousands of years ago, brought into the stylistic and technical present. The collection includes the display of a new take on cloisonné depicting ancient subjects of dragons, fire and gemstones, contemporised through fresh material combinations. Elsewhere, the collection boasts works that take as their inspiration the pillars of Chinese modernism, from Qi Baishi to Wu Guanzhong. The Collection also references the eras of Song, Yuan and Tang, golden ages of education, industry and enterprise, where China was the world’s trailblazer in almost all areas, particularly the Arts, and home to a taste-shaping elite, emulating middle class, and huge mass of labour force – much as it is once more today.

Beyond constructing cultural threads through time, the programme is also firmly anchored to its locale – China’s ‘northern capital’, that is ‘bei jing’. Taking its cue from the adage that captures the Rosewood spirit – ‘A Sense of Place’ – the Collection dovetails with the hotel’s philosophy on practical and inspirational levels. Practical, by commissioning a majority of Beijing-based artists to reflect the capital as a place of artistic production, interaction and the old or adopted hometown of so many artists, both Chinese and foreign. Creatively inspirational, through the subjects of mountain ‘shan shui’ painting that is also the physical terrain that surrounds Beijing and the traditions of her literati’s cerebral life through the prevalence of calligraphy and the myths and legends of northern China.

Please click to download the art catalogue created for Rosewood Hotel Beijing.