Chinese brands have learned to collaborate with culture. Now they need to patronize it

I left Homo Faber in Venice feeling something I rarely feel after an exercise in Chinese cultural export: pride. I have spent much of my career working between China and Europe, and I am usually critical of the way Chinese culture is presented to Western audiences. Too often, the emphasis falls on antiquity and technical virtuosity. A technique has survived 500 years. A craft has passed down through generations. The audience is invited to admire the achievement, but rarely given a reason to care about its place in contemporary life. At this year's Homo Faber, the biennial dedicated to contemporary craftsmanship on Venice's San Giorgio Maggiore, the Chinese presence feels different. Twenty-eight China-based artisans are taking part in the 2026 edition, which runs to September 30, working in lacquer, porcelain, bamboo, embroidery, metal, paper, wood and mixed media. It is the most successful example of Chinese cultural export I have encountered in Europe in the past decade, precisely because no singular version of “Chinese craft” was on offer. Two works stayed with me for very different reasons. The first is a lotus leaf lidded jar by Gan Erke (甘而可), made by the “tuotai” (脱胎) method, in which ramie cloth is saturated again and again with lacquer and tile ash over a core that is removed once the shell can hold its own shape. Gold leaf lines the inside. Gan is from Huangshan in southern Anhui province. I spent my teenage years in Hefei, the provincial capital, before leaving China and eventually settling in Europe. Anhui now belongs to a more distant part of my life, one I rarely encounter in the cultural spaces I inhabit in the West. Seeing an artist from that part of China at Homo Faber affected me in a way I had not expected. The second encounter was almost the reverse. “A Luminous Ark” occupies an entire architectural space, the ambulacrum of the Palladian Refectory, where enormous illuminated birds hang overhead. Each is built from Tyvek cut by hand and stretched across a forged metal frame, by methods drawn from Chinese lantern-making. Homo Faber credits the work to Wen Qiuwen (温秋雯), who developed it from drawings of Venetian species by artistic director Es Devlin and her studio. It was spectacular and almost impossible not to photograph. No label was visible, and I had no idea where the maker was from. Because of the scale of the work and the prominence of the space it had been given, I assumed without thinking that it was unlikely to be Chinese. Only on the train back to Milan did I discover that Wen is a Chinese artist based in Hangzhou. The realization brought an unexpected rush of pride, then discomfort at my own assumption. After more than two decades in the West, I had apparently internalized the idea that a Chinese craft artist was unlikely to be handed a space of that prominence at an international exhibition of this stature. That experience captured what makes the Chinese presence feel different. Wen took a Chinese lantern-making method and turned it on Venetian birds, worked from drawings by a British artist, and hung the result inside Palladian architecture. Nobody was putting tradition on display. Tradition was being put to work. China does not lack cultural material. Its difficulty has been in letting that material take part in contemporary international culture without stopping every few steps to explain its Chinese-ness. What Mazda understood During Homo Faber, I took part in two workshops presented by Mazda, one in hanko carving and another in kintsugi. In both sessions I was the only Asian participant. Seven other people, mostly Italian and American, were learning a craft technique and absorbing a cultural association at the same time. Hanko is Japanese. Kintsugi is Japanese. Materials, calligraphy, instruction and setting all pointed the same way, toward a coherent Japanese cultural vocabulary. To turn this into another argument over whether a practice originated in China or Japan is to miss the more consequential point. Historical origin does not automatically produce contemporary cultural capital. Culture accumulates meaning through repetition, interpretation, education, institutions and continued participation. Japan has been exceptionally good at making those associations legible internationally. Mazda’s commercial mechanism was easy to read: Japanese cultural capital converted into brand capital. Yet the company’s relationship with the Michelangelo Foundation runs beyond the workshops. Mazda Motor Europe was country sponsor for Japan at the 2025-26 Homo Faber Fellowship, backing two master-fellow duos through a seven-month programme that places recent graduates in a master artisan’s workshop. The public-facing activation sits on top of a longer institutional commitment. Work by Fellowship master artisans Harumi Sugiura and Kuniko Maeda, and by fellow Momoka Ienaga, is shown at this year's biennial with Mazda's backing. More importantly, Mazda does not control the platform. Homo Faber is presented by the Michelangelo Foundation, established in 2016 by Johann Rupert and Franco Cologni, and its ties to the luxury industry run deep. Richemont, which Rupert chairs, sponsors the Foundation, and several of its maisons exhibit at the biennial: Cartier, Vacheron Constantin, Van Cleef & Arpels, Buccellati and Vhernier. Yet the Foundation’s cultural remit is larger than any one sponsor. Japanese craftsmanship does not occupy the center. Neither does Mazda. Craft traditions from around the world coexist within the same framework. Had Mazda spent the same money on “The Mazda Exhibition of Japanese Craftsmanship,” I would have read the exercise as corporate storytelling. At Homo Faber, the same money reads as patronage, and the cultural capital it buys feels earned. Chinese brands already understand culture Chinese brands already work with domestic craftspeople, often with considerable sophistication. Songmont (山下有松), for example, has researched and presented regional craft traditions through its own exhibitions. Its 2026 brand exhibition “Innerscape · Innerwild” (心无所住), staged at the Zhong’an Meifeng Building on Shanghai’s Rockbund, drew on traditions including “pulu” weaving (氆氇), patchwork and tiger hats. This is meaningful work. Structurally, however, it remains brand-led cultural authorship. Songmont researches the culture, builds the platform, interprets what it means and stays the principal narrator. When a company creates the context in which its own legitimacy is demonstrated, that authority remains self-conferred. Institutional patronage is understood too. Li-Ning (李宁) announced a three-year patronage partnership with the Centre Pompidou in January 2020, backing exhibitions including “Matisse, Like a Novel” and the museum’s Move performance festival. Tencent (腾讯) has funded Great Wall conservation since 2016, donating more than 35 million RMB ($5.2 million) through a special fund set up with the China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation, which paid for restoration work on sections in Beijing and at Xifengkou in Hebei. Companies like these know how to work with craftspeople, fund culture and attach themselves to respected institutions. The connection between those activities is what stays fragmented. From cultural collaborator to cultural patron Over the years, companies in automotive, appliances, fashion and homeware have approached me with variations of the same ambition: which European fashion house, designer, architect or cultural figure should we collaborate with? Association with established European design and luxury can transfer status. The underlying relationship is still one of borrowing, in which a brand gains proximity to somebody else's accumulated authority. Homo Faber points to a more ambitious alternative: funding the independent infrastructure that lets Chinese cultural production develop, transmit knowledge and travel. That means paying for apprenticeships, backing institutions the funder does not control, financing residencies and research, and getting craftspeople into international exhibitions alongside their peers. It also requires accepting that the corporate logo does not always need to be the largest thing in the room. Commercial logic still holds. Sustained patronage lets a company take a credible part in cultural life, and over time that cultural capital becomes brand capital. The decisive question is whether culture exists to validate the brand, or whether the brand helps create conditions in which culture can exist beyond it. Turning culture into content is something Chinese brands have become very good at. Turning culture into institutions is the more interesting opportunity now. A branded collaboration says: look at our credentials. Patronage says: we believe this deserves to exist. Years have gone into asking whose cultural capital to borrow. The better question is what cultural capital a company is willing to help create. The paradox is that the less culture needs to be about the brand, the more valuable it becomes for the brand. This is an opinion piece and does not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Richard Bao is a Milan-based brand strategist specializing in luxury, digital strategy, and connecting Western brands with Chinese consumers.

Chinese brands have learned to collaborate with culture. Now they need to patronize it

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Chinese brands have learned to collaborate with culture. Now they need to patronize it

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag