whitelies index — THE OPEN FOLD

What unfolds in this very first book publication of Whitelies is a conversation with a place, about a place, and with the people shaped by it. At the heart of this dialogue stands the West Lake in Hangzhou—a city where tradition and modernity walk side by side. Beneath its surface of high-speed rail lines and seamless connectivity lies a slower rhythm, one where culture has not only been preserved but continues to breathe. Like an Open Fold, this encounter reveals the surfaces we touch—creases as paths, impressions as memories—offering a shared space between exposure and reflection. This first edition of Whitelies Index brings together four artists in a shared encounter with that rhythm, exploring how this landscape informs and transforms our practice.

The CHANEL Métiers d’Art Show was staged here in December 2024—not merely as a runway event—but as a sensory and environmental composition. As the day faded into dusk, the sun’s final trace dissolved into the lake, and stillness settled. Then: the sound of drums. Light emerged not from the sky but from within the landscape itself. In this moment, reality gave way to a dream—like stepping into the otherworld of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, just as night falls over the sleepy onsen town. The runway became a theater embedded in the scenery—a bridge between the seen and the imagined. “The screen itself is two-dimensional, but today’s experience felt like 3D or even 4D—you could almost smell it, hear it, and feel like you’re watching a theatrical performance unfold,” Zheng Lu Xinyuan noted when we spoke about the show.

This atmosphere was inspired by the Coromandel screens that adorn Coco Chanel’s apartment in Paris—lacquered folding screens depicting imaginary landscapes and scenes from daily life in Hangzhou. These panels, though flat, held immense dimensionality. “When I saw the folding screens in the apartment, I felt a profound sense of depth—not only in terms of seeing motifs from the artwork materialized in reality, but in a much broader, more emotional way. I felt something stir within me, like a reflection of my own inner landscape,” Sakura Ando told us afterwards. Their folds and shadows carried time, memory, and movement. They conjured places not just seen, but felt—much like the lake itself when witnessed through the lens of performance and artifice. What happens when an artwork comes to life—not in a gallery, but in its imagined origin?

For this publication, Stefan Dotter created two parallel bodies of work. One is a direct expression of what he saw and encountered in Hangzhou—its textures, its people, its fragile beauty. The second responds to what remained with him afterwards: the dream-state, the echoes, the subconscious traces of an environment that quietly continues to shape perception long after we’ve left it. Filmmaker and visual artist Zheng Lu Xinyuan shares her unique relationship to the city, while Li Hui invites us into her dreamlike world that was heavily shaped by Hangzhou. Ziyi Le bridges all our bodies of work with his tranquil and contemplative portraits spread throughout the publication.

As with everything Whitelies has stood for as a magazine in the past, this first book publication under our new direction has a visual and cultural exchange at its heart—a multi-layered conversation between artists and landscapes, between the tangible and the invisible. Between reality and a dream.