Zi Li: ‘Emoticon’ explores visual language in jewellery

Zi Li is a contemporary jewellery designer and maker from China. After studying Craft, Art & Design in Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, she graduated from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, with a Master's in Jewellery Design. Li's jewellery consists exclusively of limited edition pieces. Each piece is preceded by a thorough design process, handcrafted and 3D print technology with great attention to details, reflecting inspiration from the emotional faces and the architecture of cityscapes.

Since we entered the age of digital, emoji has become a visual symbolic language which is gradually growing deeper into many peoples’ lives. It offers a way not to have to speak but to share your thoughts with others who can simply observe. ‘Emoticon’, Li’s collection seeks to offer a new way to express your emotions.

‘Emoticon’ is a project that explores the emotional experience of living in cities, offering a thoughtful and humorous reflection on the changing facial expression of feelings from the banal to the intimate through the language of emoticons and rhythms of city lives.

Inspired by the deceptive simplicity of modern communication in the city, Li hopes to recount differing emotional contents and conduct a kind of speechless dialogue and exchange with the spatial wearers and observers in design. The vivid faces, passed through a 3D print technology have divided and distorted into separate parts. Li reunites them into narratives, into delicate, unexpected jewellery forms to tell a story of the emotional experience of our lives in the city.

Image source: Zi Li