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Hypebeast
21-05-2025
- Business
- Hypebeast
Take a Look Inside Lemaire's First China Boutique in Chengdu
Summary Lemaire's first boutique in China, located in Chengdu's Taikoo Li district, is a masterful blend of tranquility and cultural heritage. Designed byF.O.G. Architecture, this 140-square-meter space opts for a recessed façade that creates a buffer zone between the bustling shopping center and the serene interior. This entryway, adorned with movable potted plants housed in traditional Sichuan sauce jars, echoes the under-eaves spaces of classical Chinese architecture, offering visitors a ritualistic passage into the store's immersive environment. Materiality plays a central role in the store's design, with local bamboo serving as a recurring motif throughout the space. From bamboo flooring and curtains to stone textures that mimic woven bamboo, the design balances authenticity and abstraction in its architectural narrative. Traditional Sichuan crafts are thoughtfully integrated, showcasing collaborative efforts between the architects, local artists and regional artisans. Examples include Yi-made Cha'erwa wool shawls that are repurposed as curtain panels and woven Cizhu bamboo door handles. This fusion of local craftsmanship and global aesthetics ensures the boutique remains contextually authentic while aligning with Lemaire's minimalist design philosophy. Moroccan Bejmat tiles, a distinctive signature element frequently used by Lemaire, are incorporated into the design, referencing the subtle greyscale tones found in traditional Chinese masonry. This choice further enhances the boutique's harmonious interplay of diverse materials. Architectural details within the space also derive inspiration from local historical structures. For instance, baseboards are reimagined from the wooden thresholds of the Du Fu Thatched Cottage, transforming them into soft and fluid transitions between different surfaces. The store's serene atmosphere is reinforced by its thoughtful spatial organization, which subtly integrates technical ingenuity into its design. Vertical boards are discreetly embedded within door frames, while gaps left on both sides of the threshold imply their presence without disrupting the visual flow. The extended lintel above the entrance doubles as a wooden hanging bar, elegantly displaying apparel while maintaining the boutique's understated aesthetic. Lemaire ChengduBoutique 1342, 1/F Building 18, Taikoo Li ChengduNo. 8 Zhongshamao Street, Jinjiang DistrictChengdu, Sichuan, China 610021
Los Angeles Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Madeleine Thien's voyagers embrace humanity. That makes them outlaws
In an era in which we've been told that mass data-mining and plagiarism will lead to a magical artificial intelligence that will solve all the great mysteries of life, 'The Book of Records' is a reminder that human genius and the artistry of stunning prose are the antidote to AI's codswallop. Madeleine Thien has penned an all-too-human novel that explores themes of collaboration and resistance, exile and community, and the banality of living in 'interesting times.' Physicists have long wrestled with a basic question: What are space and time? As human beings, we think of time as the span between the day we are born and the day we die. We understand intellectually that people have come before us and people will exist after us, but being able to grasp that time relies on empathy fostered by reading, viewing art or touching ancient buildings. In 'The Book of Records,' 7-year-old Lina and her computer scientist father are on board a 22nd-century ship carrying them into exile when he explains the basic structure of time and space to her. 'He told me that everything would be obvious if I took a piece of string and folded it over and through itself to form a double-coin knot,' Lina recalls. 'The string is time and the knot is space,' he concluded. 'But they're the same. See?' Global climate change has caused the oceans to overwhelm the land, and the ship's passengers are refugees in search of solid ground. The metaphor of the double-coin knot recurs throughout the novel; each passenger is on his or her journey through time and space. Lina left her family library behind, except for three books about fellow voyagers: the Chinese poet Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, the Portuguese Jewish philosopher exiled to the Netherlands, and Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who, as as Jew, was forced to flee when the Nazis took power. Lina knows the contents of these books so intimately that when she encounters Jupiter, Bento and Blucher, who tell stories of that trio's journeys, she becomes their wise companion. And while Thien's book is a novel of ideas, it's much more visceral, tying together the sublime joys of being human and the horrors inflicted by those other humans who hate all of the things that make us imperfect but radiant beings. Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza and Hannah Arendt were all cast out of their communities by authorities who imposed narrow definitions of acceptable thought. If we could stop thinking in such narrow definitions of time, Thien intimates, we would be capable of empathizing and understanding that even our most shattering experiences do not separate us from others. Instead, we would find meaningful community in the company of those who have been where we find ourselves now. Terence, a previously enslaved Roman playwright who wrote 'I consider nothing human alien to me,' grasped that concept, as have the myriad artists and philosophers who have expanded on that thought. Human experience, even for those we may not have personal knowledge about, helps us understand our individual selves and form the empathetic communities so necessary during dark times. Lina's own exile begins with the loss of her mother and brother. Years later, when her father is dying, he finally reveals the secret that set them on their path: The massive project to link computers and humans to fix climate change failed, and now everyone faces extinction. What will happen to human time with no one there to record it? Thien translates complex topics into art, making the esoteric deeply resonant. When Baruch gets his heart broken, she writes: 'He closed his eyes, but it only made the world within him more vivid, so he tried to picture himself between the stars, unburdened of all sensory feeling,' time a whirlwind to him. 'The world intervenes in everything we do,' she writes of his thinking, 'and we turn and stumble in its innumerable fragments.' We string together fragments to make sense of the senseless, Thien observes, 'searching backwards for a cause.' She describes the 'passionate indifference' that Arendt substitutes for love-making when her marriage becomes a broken clock that can't be fixed. Reading Thien is to admire how she brush-strokes language to create beauty. Exile is grief. And exile is set into motion by trauma, whether that be from a state set on genocide or climate change and the ravaging effects of colonialism that have stripped the land of all sustenance. Refugees from Central America, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, refugees cast out of their faith community for heresy, artists made refugee by the delusions of their patrons, and those left refugee on America's streets because of economic disparity or domestic violence have all been torn away from what they love, all the things they've lost. I've hesitated about giving away too much of the plot of 'The Book of Records' for the same reason I don't go on guided tours of a city I'm visiting. Thien's book is full of unexpected moments of beauty and pleasure I don't want to ruin for those about to enter its pages. Delight is in discovery. In our own interesting times, it's a great relief to be reminded that none of what is happening is alien. The individual insistence that 'no one has ever faced this same moment' is the cause of so much pain, exacerbated by those governments that seek to erase the human history of betrayal and resistance and struggle, evoking a mythical, conflict-free path. Destroying connections to time and community is the goal of authoritarianism. As one of the novel's characters says, 'Survival required disobedience, and each of them must become an outlaw. So be it.' Thien has written a brilliant outlaw novel. Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien review – a dazzling fable of migration
The sea takes many forms in fiction. It was an adventure playground in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and a rowdy neighbour in Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn. It played the wine-dark seducer in Homer's Odyssey and the snot-green tormentor in Joyce's Ulysses. But while its colour can change and its humour may vary, its fictional properties remain reassuringly stable. The sea is our unconscious, a repository of memory, the beginning and end of all things. It's what Jules Verne described as the 'Living Infinite'. In Madeleine Thien's rapturous fourth novel, The Book of Records, 'the Sea' is the name given to a gargantuan migrant compound, sprawled on the shoreline a decade or two in the future. Lina and her ailing father, Wui Shin, occupy an apartment on the labyrinthine 12th floor, from where they can watch the refugee boats pull in and depart. The pair have fled the flooded Pearl River Delta, leaving behind Lina's mother, brother and aunt but carrying three volumes from an epic biographical series entitled The Great Lives of Voyagers. These tattered instalments cover the respective histories of the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, the Chinese poet Du Fu and the Portuguese-Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza. They provide both a link to the past and a sextant to navigate by. The world exists in endless flux, Lina is told, and yet here in the Sea nothing ever goes missing. Its chambers fill and empty like locks on a canal. Different portions of the compound appear to correspond with different decades. 'The buildings of the Sea are made of time,' Wui Shin explains. Naturally this near-future migrant fable is also by extension a novel of ideas. It's about the ways in which experience and knowledge are handed down or slip free, to the point where we inherit and inhabit the lives of those who have gone before. Wui Shin once worked as a 'cyberspace engineer' for a state-controlled tech firm, restricting access to the Chinese internet. His daughter's story, though, plays out as an unfettered open inquiry, cross-referencing the laws of physics with the writings of Kafka, Proust and Italo Calvino. Thien – who was born in Canada to Chinese parents – is fascinated by the relationship of memory to history and by the cross-pollination of separate cultures and writers. Intriguingly, her 2016 Booker-shortlisted novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing contains a close cousin of Lina's Great Lives series: the fragment from a book of historical records which has been copied by hand and smuggled out of China. The Sea recycles its wares, just as novelists do. Each standalone story is like a beaker dipped and drawn from a wider body of work. Lina will go on to spend many years in the Sea, but as the book begins, the girl has no sooner settled into her apartment than the doors slide open to reveal her neighbours. The refugees gather around the new arrival like Dorothy's companions in The Wizard of Oz. They breezily introduce themselves as Jupiter, Bento and Blucher, but they are also the avatars of Du Fu, Spinoza and Arendt. It is through their stories that we learn how Spinoza was labelled a heretic in 17th-century Amsterdam and Arendt went to ground in Nazi-occupied France. 'You do know a lot about Du Fu,' Lina tells Jupiter at one point. 'What am I,' Jupiter replies, 'other than the things I know?' The 12th floor of the Sea is a rarefied realm. Conversations constantly circle back to the big subjects: history and language; freedom and identity. And yet The Book of Records offers more than an intellectual talking shop. Its cramped apartment is the springboard from which the story glides out through various vibrant subplots, each furnished with a cast of vivid bit-players, some of whom (the blond visa clerk with the runny nose; the apprentice lens grinder with the bandaged hand) are described and dispensed with in a deft line or two. Lina's three migrants are essentially ghosts themselves, passing through history in the blink of an eye. But their respective quests are made to feel urgent and ongoing, and we thrill to their adventures as though they are happening in real time. Arendt and her husband eventually cross the Pyrenees on foot, stumbling on the narrow mountain path, watching out for border guards. They dream of a safe Atlantic passage and a fresh start in New York, 'a place in the future where the past can meet'. The Book of Records is a rich and beautiful novel. It's serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change. If this turbulent, mercurial tale has an anchor, it is its belief that 'in order to extend life and preserve civilisation, we are obliged to rescue one another'. Thien explains in the acknowledgments that she has lifted this quote from The Book of Mountains and Rivers, a 2012 essay collection by the Chinese writer Yu Qiuyu. She hands it on from Arendt to Blucher to Lina in the Sea, as though it's a baton or a lifeline that connects all the world's great voyagers. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien is published by Granta (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Fancy a fictional train-ride with the best of Europe's philosophers?
The Book of Records is a hard novel to pin down. The title draws on a motif from Madeleine Thien's last novel, the Booker Prize-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), about the far-reaching effects of the Cultural Revolution on a group of musicians who met at the Shanghai Conservatory. One of the new book's subjects is the complexity of historical memory. Complex in various ways: since every story is an attempt to impose a version of the truth, historical memory and the ways it can be manipulated become instruments of state control. But memory is also one of the last defenses of the powerless, even if it leads to its own problems: 'Could a person and the memory of that person diverge so far that recollection itself became a kind of betrayal?' The novel begins with a middle-aged woman remembering some of the defining events of her childhood: namely, arriving with her father at a refugee camp, known a little confusingly as the Sea. Lina is seven years old and doesn't understand why they've left their hometown of Foshan, in China, or why they've become separated from her mother and brother, and we're as much in the dark as she. Narrative confusion, though, offers an expansion of possibilities – time and space function in unpredictable ways. Windows and doors open unexpectedly onto different views and realities, depending on the people who are in them or their moods. As Lina's father, Wui Shin, explains to her, 'the buildings of the Sea are made of time.' Ships arrive periodically to carry the refugees away, but the body of water they appear on changes from day to day. Sometimes it's the Atlantic, sometimes it's the Atrai River or the South China Sea… Part of the point is to turn the Sea into a symbol of refugee camps all over the world, across all times, but also to suggest the way that each of those camps is in itself a shifting, temporary ground where different cultures briefly, glancingly, come together before moving on. When they fled Foshan, Lina's father took with him three books from her childhood home, instalments from an educational series on The Great Lives of Voyagers. He picked them because they looked like they hadn't been read: 'Number 3 was about Du Fu, the poet. Number 70 was Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher. Number 84 was Hannah Arendt, a writer.' The plot, such as it is, begins to take shape when Lina opens a previously unseen door in her apartment block and enters into a world of mysterious neighbours – two men and a woman who turn out to be, in ways the novel never quite specifies, vague incarnations of the subjects of her three books. Meanwhile, the neighbours tell stories, about Du Fu, about Spinoza, about Arendt, separated by centuries and oceans but held together by a common search for meaning – a kind of forced migration in itself, toward truth but away from home. Thien doesn't make her job easy. She has to keep creating narrative momentum from scratch, and it's a testament to her skills as a writer that she manages so often. One of the highlights of the novel is Arendt's escape from occupied France, through which Thien guides us with great patience and dramatic skill. But even here she sometimes lets the ideas take over from the more intimate weight of the personal stories. On her train ride into Lisbon, Arendt gets into a philosophical debate with the strangers in her cabin. One of them cites Descartes: 'Tell me this… If the outside world is erased from all five senses, what is time?' It's a conversation that makes sense in a novel that functions at the crossroads of fantasy, history and philosophy, but those games come at a price: the moment doesn't feel very real. As I said: a hard novel to pin down or sum up. Thien writes brilliantly about Wui Shin's history, and the reason why he fled Foshan with his daughter. He's a systems engineer who had, almost unwittingly, become a state informer: 'He'd had no moral centre because he had taken it as a matter of fact that he could not be corrupted.' Eventually he even informs on his wife, not because he wants to but because he thinks it would look more suspicious if he doesn't say anything: systems involve you in their own logic, whether you believe in them or not. And yet the story of his life with Lina never quite takes off and remains a framing device – the fantasy element is a kind of puncture in reality through which narrative pressure leaks away. Of course, the novel is self-aware enough to know that. As Lina's father warns her at the beginning: 'you'll never be content if you can't separate what you want from what really is.'
