Xiaofan Zhang examines how Chinese wallpaper evolved through cross-cultural exchange, highlighting the role of Chinese artisans in adapting designs for global markets. Using theories of Orientalism and hybridity, she presents wallpaper as a site of cultural negotiation and material transformation.
Contemporary artist Sève Favre explores how invasive plant species, as byproducts of colonial expansion, intersect with the imagery found in Chinese wallpaper and chintz, revealing how the plants carry embedded histories of trade and power.
Wallpaper conservator Amy Junker Heslip traces a set of Chinese wallpapers from Royal Pavilion in Brighton back to their creation in Guangzhou, using their materials and pigments to reveal trade routes and offer insights into the workshops that produced them.
Louise Atkinson outlines her creative responses to the Chinese export wallpaper at Harewood House, shaped by cultural traditions and migration narratives in Leeds. Her practice is framed alongside contemporary ESEA artists who use wallpaper as a medium to explore history, identity, and cross-cultural exchange.
Dr Louise Atkinson is a contemporary artist, researcher, and community facilitator, and is currently based at the University of Leeds as a Visiting Research Fellow. Her practice explores the relationship between art and ethnography, in which she employs a range of visual and digital media and techniques, including collage, animation, repeat pattern design, and augmented reality. Her work often incorporates processes of co-production and co-curation, creating new narratives with other people in response to existing archives, collections, and histories.
Xiaofan Zhang is a doctoral researcher at the University for the Creative Arts, UK. Specialising in art-cultural studies and education, her practice bridges academic research with public engagement through oil paintings and illustrations exhibited across China. She is currently completing doctoral research exploring historical Sino-British cultural exchange and aesthetic dialogue through Chinese wallpaper, revealing how material objects mediate transnational artistic encounters.
Sève Favre is a Swiss-Belgian interdisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, installation, and digital media. Her practice centres on interactivity, aiming to break down the boundary between artwork and viewer. She often integrates both tactile and digital elements, inviting audiences to engage directly with her work through in-situ installations, performances, and virtual components. She has exhibited widely and is currently developing a solo exhibition in response to her recent research residency at the Swiss Wallpaper Museum.
Amy Junker Heslip is an Accredited Paper Conservator with over 20 years’ experience, currently based at Brighton & Hove Museums. Since 2020, her research has focused on the Chinese export wallpaper collection at the Royal Pavilion, supported by awards from the Paul Mellon Centre and the Wallpaper History Society. She is now undertaking a CHASE-funded PhD with the University of Sussex, exploring the archives and material composition of these wallpapers through a conservation lens.
