Roughly two months after Loewe opened the doors to its Gaozhai store in Chengdu, Sichuan, the Spanish luxury fashion house launched the first exhibition at the location. The exhibition is also accompanied by a special supplement to the fourth issue of the Loewe magazine, dedicated to the Southwest China city. The exhibition will remain open until 11 September.
Titled “Chengdu Got Hands” (成都有一手), the exhibition is centred around photography by Chinese photographer Bowei Yang. The work on display focuses on the hands of people living and working in Chengdu, and how they built the city. Ten groups of artists, artisans and creatives from communities around Chengdu were photographed by Yang, along with their handiwork, from installation artists to pastry chefs. The magazine includes work Yang made for the exhibition, as well as his dialogues with the subjects of his photos.
Gaozhai (高宅, lit. the Gao Mansion), is a traditional courtyard and was once the ancestral home to Gao Delin (高德麟, b. 1930), the descendent of Emperor Kangxi’s teacher Gao Shiqi, a calligraphist, art critic and collector, a notable man of letter in Chengdu. It is now part of the Taikoo Li shopping complex that houses several luxury and designer brands. The Loewe Gaozhai store is its third shop in Chengdu. It follows Taikoo Li’s aesthetic, a combination of temple and market to combine Chinese and Spanish elements in design.
On Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, the topic “Loewe Chengdu Gaozhai” has accumulated 14.80 million views. On the lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu (RED), there are already more than 34,000 notes about the topic “Chengdu got hands Loewe” about either the exhibition or the magazine.
Loewe held a major block-busting exhibition earlier this year in Beijing. It showed that exhibitions, when done right, can significantly raise awareness of luxury brands. The latest photography display in Chengdu is an extension of the strategy, and also focuses on both art and craft. The hyper-local subject matter and location, on the other hand, adds a localisation layer to the regional store. The interest netizens are showing on social media proves the strategy seems to be working.
