At the edge of Haba Snow Mountain, just above the timberline where pine gives way to stone, mist arrives before the morning does. It moves across the folds of the valley with no urgency, a slow, quiet presence that softens everything it touches. The village of Niru lives within this rhythm.
It’s a place rarely found by accident. Nestled in the northwest of Yunnan Province, Niru is home to a small Naxi community whose days begin with water drawn from glacial streams and whose roofs catch the first light that cuts through cloud. There are no neon signs here, no rows of windows glowing into the night, just stillness, altitude, and the distant hum of snowmelt.
A view from Niru, 2003
Lamu Yeyang with her best friend Baiju, 2022
It was in this landscape, beneath the drift of sky and stone, that Lamu Yeyang returned after years away. A Naxi woman in her early thirties, she had studied design in Lijiang, then in Chengdu, but never found the language that matched what she felt about home. Until she found glass. Not in the traditional sense, there are no historical glassblowing guilds in this region, but as a contemporary material capable of holding emotion without decoration. She began to experiment with temperature, breath, and time. Glass, she realised, could carry mist without defining it.
In a quiet studio she built near the edge of the village, Lamu began making vessels that didn’t shout for attention. Plates and bowls that shimmered at their edges, never quite solid in tone, always slightly blurred, like memory. Her work was never meant to revive tradition. It was something else entirely: a way of translating atmosphere into form.
Lamu at her studio, 2019
Quiet moment of a corner, 2019
The Mist Plate emerged slowly from this process. Formed by hand from layers of translucent glass, its surface carries soft spirals, not painted, not etched, but embedded in the making. These marks resemble nothing directly: not clouds, not water, not air, and yet they suggest all three. Held to the light, the plate reveals depth beneath its simplicity. Set on a table, it seems to both hold and dissolve the objects it carries. It is not ornamental. It is quiet functional art, grounded by use, elevated by intent.
Each plate is made without moulds. The curves are not symmetrical; the swirls never repeat. Lamu says this is the only way to remain honest to the landscape that shaped them, where no two mornings look the same, and every moment of mist is already becoming something else.
The studio remains small. Production is limited not by demand, but by the rhythm of the work itself. Nothing is rushed. The cooling takes as long as it needs. No two pieces leave the kiln without being held, inspected, and gently placed aside.
Mist Plate – lake collection, 2018
Each plate carries subtle variations in tone and swirl, the mark of handcraft and fire.
There is a clarity to Lamu’s practice, but also restraint. She does not call herself a revivalist, or a keeper of heritage. She says simply that her work is a way to make sense of where she’s from. In the Mist Plate, that sense becomes tangible
'a glass plate shaped not by trend, but by altitude, air, and time.'
In a world of polished surfaces and immediate meaning, it is rare to hold something that chooses to remain undefined. This is not glassware made to impress. It is glassware made to feel, the hush of morning, the drift of cloud, the presence of mist in the hand.
' The air folds inside, tracing shapes only wind could draw.'
