When we look at twentieth-century design, we often describe it through movements Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modernism, each defined by its characteristic forms and ideals. Yet beneath these stylistic differences lies a deeper logic: a structural language that determines how form expresses thought. It was this linguistic foundation that the exhibition Objectual Grammar curated by Yunxia Jiang and Wei Mo set out to explore.
Before becoming a curator, Yunxia studied linguistics. Her background still plays a big part in the way she reads and organises visual culture. “Every art movement develops its own grammar,” she says. “It has rules, repetitions and exceptions, just like a language. When we understand the structure, we understand how meaning is generated.” This idea became the conceptual foundation of Objectual Grammar.
The exhibition features a selective and diverse range of modern design objects by Alfredo Villasana, Antonio Pineda, Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe, Arne Johansen, Leonore Doskow, Kaunis Koru and Jacob Hull, to name a few, through which Yunxia illustrates how design languages evolve over time, from flowing lines of Art Nouveau to sharp geometry of Art Deco and clean functionality of Modernism.
During the late nineteenth century, when there was an increasing resistance to the standardisation of industry, curves and ornament derived from organic forms were a reaction against mass production. They signalled a return to nature. Form expressed a syntax of flow and rhythm, where ornament was an expression of feeling. René Lalique’s jewellery and Henry van de Velde’s metalwork represent this romantic movement: their whiplash lines evoke motion, continuity and sensuality.
By the 1920s and 30s, Art Deco tightened this syntax. Its language became more geometric, its tone more confident and mechanical. Streamlined forms and stylised repetition in Jean Dunand’s lacquered metalwork and the angular silver of Raymond Templier expressed an era, where symmetry, speed and progress were of value. If Art Nouveau was written in script, Art Deco spoke in shoutters.
Arriving mid-century, Modernism was looking for a language of reduction. Ornament was removed in favour of structure. Proportion and surface defined the work of metalworkers, such as Tapio Wirkkala and Vivianna Torun Bülow-Hübe, bringing craft into conversation with clarity and function. Their pieces, drawn with precision and restraint, are punctuation marks, spaces in a longer historical sentence.
By placing these periods in one exhibition, Yunxia shows us that design history doesn’t erase what came before but continually edits it. Each period modifies what came before: a conversation between nature and geometry, reason and feeling, form and function.
This choice also reflects Yunxia’s broader education. She has lived and worked in China, Spain and the UK. To her, curation is translation, between languages, materials and audiences. Curating and translating share method. Neither is about losing tone while navigating context. For her, this meant that Objectual Grammar’s curatorial design had to be driven by clarity and restraint. Zoned into small clusters, each was an individual “phrase” within the grammar of the whole show. There were no chronological panels to suggest a reading order. You had to learn the show’s rhythm. She also considered the display materials. The use of low plinths and soft neutral lighting meant that the objects were viewed at human scale.
What set Objectual Grammar apart from a retrospective was that it didn’t treat Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Modernism as separate chapters. No distinct subject areas. No separate room for each movement. Instead, she placed them as interdependent clauses within a single overall logic of structure. This approach reflects structuralist theories of language. Where meaning doesn’t arise from individual signs, but from relationships among them. One theoretical outcome was a new way of reading design history not as a sequence of innovations, but as an evolving syntax that shifts over time in response to social, economic and technological change. By treating historical style as structure rather than ornament, Yunxia made visible the intellectual coherence that connects the craft and culture.
Despite its concept, Objectual Grammar was also rooted in material experience. Yunxia’s curatorial choices ensured that design’s physical intimacy, its scale, tactility, and handcraft, wasn’t lost. Objects were approached closely. Here, to read the meeting of metal and light. To trace the subtle imperfections that record time and touch.
This balance between theory and material presence characterises much of Yunxia’s curatorial work. Objectual Grammar was structured around European and Latin American modernism. Its conceptual roots weren’t wholly Western. The sensitivity with which the works are spaced, the rhythm, the pause, reflects ideas from East Asian aesthetics. In this way, the linguistic structure of the exhibition was also cross-cultural. This fusion has since become a hallmark of Yunxia’s curatorial practice.
She believes when we describe language, we’re not describing how people spoke. We’re describing how they thought. The same goes for objects. Every line, every surface tells us how a generation perceived their world. Objectual Grammar invited an audience to see those lines not as vestiges of a stylistic epoch long past, but as proof of continuity and thought. That led her to understand the history of design not as a set of breaks, but as a grammatical sentence still being written.