Kelly Qi

Kelly Qi

Fashion Product

Bio

BFA AWARD: Jewelry Designer of the Year

A recent graduate of Parsons School of Design, Kelly Qi works at the intersection of identity, persistence, and transformation. Trained in fashion products, her practice moves between art and design, where objects are not only made but reconsidered. Informed by a multicultural background and living with lupus, her work remains attentive to what persists under observation. She works with jewelry metalworking, soldering, and Rhino-based 3D rendering, and intends to continue in fashion product design, with a sustained focus on jewelry.

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Image: She wears the use01 necklace and use06 earcuff.

Her gaze turns away, yet it does not withdraw. It settles somewhere beyond reach, as if returning the act of looking without directing it. What observes her is no longer unanswered. The glance holds, not in refusal, but in a quiet reversal, where to be seen is no longer to submit, and the gaze, once imposed, is met without yield.

the function of things

“The function of things” begins from a condition in which the body rarely belongs to itself, living beneath a gaze it cannot locate and cannot escape. Observation persists across cultural, familial, and medical systems where the body is measured, recorded, and translated into fragments. Lupus makes this condition visible, exposing a logic in which value is assigned through function, through the need to perform and justify presence.
In response, I alter vintage silverware, objects tied to etiquette and social order, bending, fracturing, and reassembling them into forms that can no longer serve. The process is not passive. Metal resists, hammered, heated, pickled, riveted, soldered, adapting while retaining trace. Closure is held through tension rather than concealment. These altered objects, like the body, persist in states of incompletion. As jewelry, they are worn and tested, no longer useful yet still present, insisting that worth does not disappear with the loss of function.
Image: Moodboard
The images are arranged as if they were following an order that was never fully explained. The silverware appears first, still intact, carrying the weight of prior use. It is followed by the table from The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago, where objects are already made to speak beyond themselves. What comes after shows a gradual shift, metal work, broken ceramics, spoons forced into new forms, each image recording an interruption rather than a resolution. Toward the end, the body enters, not directly, but through its traces, fragmented and translated through previous works on lupus. Nothing here is entirely separate. Each image seems to anticipate the next, as if the process had already been decided, and the outcome was only a matter of time.
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Primary and Secondary Research
Through primary research, I turn inward, writing fragments of autobiography, documenting illness, and observing the self as both subject and spectacle, while tracing feminist practices through artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Wangechi Mutu, and Judy Chicago, whose works reveal the quiet authority embedded in domestic rituals and objects. In response, I fracture porcelain, bend silverware, and reassemble the remnants into hybrid forms of ceramic, leather, and metal, objects that no longer serve their original function yet persist, scarred and altered, echoing the body itself: imperfect, visible, and still present.

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Initial Sketches and Iterations

Image: Experimenting and Prototyping
Prototypes are brought into relation with the body, where they are worn, tested, their presence shifting from object to adornment, suggesting that value is not determined by function, but by existence and presence. Metalwork research unfolds through quiet trials with nickel, brass, copper, stainless steel, and silver, each material responding differently under pressure and control. Through annealing, soldering, pickling, riveting, the process becomes a negotiation with resistance, echoing the body under the gaze, tested, adjusted, and measured against expectation.
Image: Annealing, Soldering, Pickling, Hammering, Riveting
The engravings are filed away, as if the object must be cleared before it can proceed, though some marks remain. Riveting follows, with wire gauges tested and adjusted until hole and wire align precisely, a quiet insistence on fit. When solder joins the pieces, it leaves a thin line at the seam, a mark that does not conceal the break but allows it to persist. After annealing, the metal is placed in acid and returned to a bare surface, as if nothing had occurred. The process repeats. The object continues. 
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Sketches

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Prototypes

Image: Final Realization vs. Initial Prototype
Image: use01 Necklace Technical Specifications
Image: use01 Necklace Technical Specifications
Image: use02 Bracelet Technical Specifications
Image: use02 Bracelet Technical Specifications
Image: She wears the use02 and use04 bracelets while holding a broken gravy boat, the object from which the work first proceeded. It remains in her hands, altered but not dismissed.

Credits:

Jewelry Designer & Creative Director:
Kelly Qi

Model:
Emily Yao

Fashion Photographer:
Jiajie Lyu

Still Life/Product Photographer & Set Stylist:
Hengyi Yang

Cinematographer:
Hengyi Yang

Prop Designer and Fabricator:
Kelly Qi

Music Composer:
Min9

Makeup Artist:
Lillian Rong

Assistants:
Amy Xiang
Chujun Tan

Special thank yous to my professors, Stone and Miguel, my parents, my sister, and all my friends for their unwavering support and guidance.