AMO presents Sail Away, a collaborative exhibition by Greek designer Leda Athanasopoulou and Chinese artist Yumo Yuan, practitioners inside the living traditions of two of the world’s most enduring cultures.
Craft is one of the oldest manifestations of human aspiration. Not merely to produce, but to wish well; to embed hope, care, and meaning into the things we live among. Abundance, continuity, beauty, benevolence: These aspirations generate the same forms independently across civilizations. Three fish sharing a single head, rotating in endless circulation, appear on ancient Egyptian faience, Greek ceramics, and Chinese carvings.
For this project, Leda curates and commissions pieces from the island of Lesvos, where traditional potters in the village of Mantamados still fire local clay in kilns fueled by olive pits. The exhibition also features aluminum-cast taverna chairs and tama shoes, which are hand-painted by a local artist in the nearby village of Kalloni. Tama, or tamata, are traditional votive offerings left at altars, symbolizing protection and safe passage. It is these century-spanning traditions that she seeks to preserve and renew, working with an array of Greek artisans.
Yumo’s work draws on vintage textile fragments from both his and Leda’s personal archives, treating fabric as a form of storytelling where pattern, structure, and technique introduce memory into modern contexts. Through an exchange of research and object studies, Leda has taught Yumo to “speak Greek,” or at least its symbolic vocabulary. A bunch of grapes, a ship under sail, the rooster, a shell – all Greek motifs translated into hand-painted silk weavings inspired by 18th-century warp print techniques. The result is soft, blurred compositions that marry Chinese folk art aesthetics with Hellenic imagery.