Taiwan’s decorative tiles find a new life in London

At London Design Festival, Taiwanese fashion label BOO and artist Yung Hsuan Wang transformed an architectural tradition into clothing, artwork and a study of how cultural symbols travel.

The decorative tiles that once covered Taiwanese homes were never simply there to make a wall more attractive. Flowers, geometric patterns and auspicious symbols carried ideas of prosperity, happiness and protection into the spaces of everyday life.

At London Design Festival this month, those motifs left the architecture behind.

Tiled Reverie, presented on Charlotte Street from September 12 to 16, brought together Taiwanese fashion label BOOand London based Taiwanese artist Yung Hsuan Wang, known as Walkthecatt, to explore what happens when a familiar piece of Taiwan’s visual history is placed within contemporary fashion and art.

The exhibition drew on the richly coloured decorative tiles that became widespread across Taiwan during the early twentieth century. Rather than attempting to reproduce them as historical objects, BOO and Wang treated their patterns as material for something new.

For BOO, that meant clothing.

Original textile prints took elements of the tiles and reconstructed them through graphic lines, contrasting colours and contemporary silhouettes. Patterns once fixed permanently to buildings could instead move with the person wearing them.

It is a simple shift, but an interesting one. Cultural preservation is often associated with keeping an object as close to its original state as possible. Tiled Reverie approached heritage differently, asking whether traditions can remain relevant precisely because designers are prepared to alter their form.

From architecture to clothing

BOO was founded in 2022 by Taiwanese designer Bao Wen Chen, whose work centres heavily on original prints. Flowers, vintage imagery, memories and cultural references are collected and reconstructed into textiles rather than treated simply as decorative additions.

That made Taiwan’s tiles particularly suitable material.

Their original purpose already went beyond decoration. The imagery embedded in them carried meanings and aspirations for the households in which they appeared. Moving those symbols onto clothing changes their context, but retains the idea of something personal being carried through everyday life.

Alongside BOO’s clothes, Wang presented original artworks offering another interpretation of the same visual heritage.

The London based artist works across collage, watercolour, oil pastel and coloured pencil, often drawing upon ordinary objects, nature and scenes around the dining table. Her practice is concerned with the relationship between people, objects and memory, making the exhibition as much about recollection as pattern.

Together, the two approaches created a progression from architecture to art and finally to the body.

What happens when heritage travels?

There was another layer to presenting the exhibition in London.

Taiwanese decorative tiles belong to a particular architectural and cultural history, yet here they were being reconsidered thousands of miles away by Taiwanese creatives working within an international design festival.

That movement raises a question increasingly relevant to contemporary fashion and design. Heritage does not remain geographically fixed simply because its origins are important. Designers move, communities move and the objects and visual languages associated with them travel too.

What changes is the way they are interpreted.

In Tiled Reverie, a pattern that might once have formed part of a Taiwanese domestic interior became a textile print in London. The symbolism remained recognisable, but its purpose had changed.

For five days on Charlotte Street, BOO and Wang showed that preserving a visual tradition need not mean leaving it untouched. Sometimes its continuation depends upon allowing it to become something else.