Ahead of Qixi, lifestyle brand The Beast (野兽派) has appointed actress Wen Qi (文淇) as its youth spokesperson and handed her control of its social accounts for three days. The campaign turns Wen Qi into a plant photographer. She enters a new studio, receives a stubborn night-blooming cereus and waits for it to flower. The resulting dream becomes the inspiration for The Beast’s Qixi fragrance, Love Letter Without Words.
This isn’t her only job. For Qixi 2026, she is also starring in Gucci’s Qixi mini-series and Chaumet’s seasonal short film. Other recent appointments have come from Aimer, Armani Beauty, and Songmont too.
The rush to employ Wen Qi is really a trick of campaign season timing. She’s worked with Gucci since 2023. Chaumet added her in December 2025. Qixi has simply pushed several existing partnerships into public view at once. But there is very good reason brands keep choosing her.
Wen Qi combines bookish, slightly androgynous cool with the vitality and huoren gan, or human realness, currently popular online
Wen Qi turns 23 this month but already has the credentials of a much older performer. She won a Golden Horse Award aged 14, starred in Girls on Wire when it entered the 2025 Berlinale competition, and served on this year’s Shanghai International Film Festival Asian New Talent jury.
Then there is the image. Wen Qi combines bookish, slightly androgynous cool with the vitality and huoren gan, or human realness, currently popular online. She can appear intelligent, outdoorsy, playful, or quietly luxurious without losing her identity.
The Dao view: Brands might be buying diminishing returns
Wen Qi’s appeal contains a built-in risk. Brands choose her because she feels selective, culturally credible, and less commercially exposed than a conventional traffic star. Yet Gucci, Chaumet, Aimer and The Beast are all drawing on broadly the same qualities at once. As the partnerships multiply, they risk diluting the scarcity they are buying. Her value therefore depends on separating categories and campaign narratives, rather than simply maximising exposure.
