Yifan Renxu’s Pillow Vase Holds the Trace of Leather

I. The Object

The first thing you notice about a Yifan Renxu vase is that it looks pressed. Not thrown, not carved — pressed, as though the clay was cupped between two hands and held until it took the shape of the grip. The surface is smooth but not flat: it folds inward on itself in several places, creating lobed forms that change the silhouette completely depending on the angle. From the front, the form reads as architectural. Turned slightly, it looks like something at rest.

The weight is a small surprise. High-white porcelain (高白泥) is a dense material, and Renxu works with it at a thickness that makes her objects feel more substantial than the form implies. The impression on the surface is not decorative in the applied sense — it is structural. It is what the clay recorded when leather was pressed into it before firing.

Three Finishes,
Three Different Objects.

The Pillow Vase comes in three surface treatments. Calling them finishes undersells what each one does to the object. The underlying form is the same — same leather impression, same compressed silhouette — but the read changes so substantially between versions that looking at them side by side, you would not immediately reach for the same word to describe them.

The electroplated pieces sit closest to jewellery and metalwork in their register — precise, with a surface that changes in different lights. The glazed versions are warmer and more domestic, the kind of object that reads differently in morning light than in the evening. The unglazed porcelain is the most stripped: no coating directs the eye, and the leather impression reads at its most literal. These are not three colourways. They are three different propositions about what the same object can be.

The Pillow Vase
and What Comes After.

The leather-mold process is a technique, not a single product. The practice points toward applying it across different object categories — forms with different relationships to the body and to daily use. The tableware work, which brings the leather impression into plates and bowls used at close range and handled repeatedly, changes the terms of the encounter. A surface that can be admired from across the room becomes a surface the hands find every time they pick up an object.

What the work suggests, across all its current forms, is an interest in the gap between the surface you see and the surface you touch — and in what it means for an object to carry the record of another material that is no longer present. Where that inquiry leads beyond the pieces currently in production is an open question. The practice is still finding its range.

Why Her Work
Stood Out.

TRLab looks for independent designers whose work has a clear formal proposition — not a style, not a surface trend, but a specific way of thinking about what an object is and what it does. Yifan Renxu's practice has that. The leather-mold process is not a technique in search of an application. It is the answer to a question the work has been asking from the start: what survives when the thing that made the impression is gone?

That question produces objects with a consistency that is rare at an early stage of a practice. A Pillow Vase and a tableware piece from this studio are immediately recognisable as coming from the same source, made by someone pursuing the same inquiry across different forms. That coherence is what TRLab's selection is based on.