Vinh Lê

Designer biography:

Vinh Lê (b. Vietnam) lives and works in Bucharest. Creation has never been optional for Lê, following him from his birthplace in the deep mangrove jungle of the Mekong Delta, through the United States of America and now in Romania. Trained in sculpture at Western Michigan University, he works across jewelry, ceramic, sculpture, performance, and drawing. Lê’s work is in a constant exploration of external and internal materiality, exploring myth, memory, and the architectures of displacement.

Collection concept:

A hopeful existence in a time of humanity’s own undoing, requires connecting to forms of life that are beyond human time and scale. The collection The Peace of Wild Things, named after Wendell Berry’s poem, moves from a place of despair about the future of humanity, towards hope for a larger than life existence by meditating on animals, trees, stones and nature’s ebbs as anchors into a continuous present moment. For its property to withstand severe conditions, jewelry becomes the vessel that can hold ‘the grace of the world’ for when we will return the world to our kinship who walked it, swimmed it, flew it, fed on it, cared for it before human entered.

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time