LISHA BAI REFRAMES HERMÈS ON MADISON AVENUE

Artist Lisha Bai’s textiles are studies in depth and dimensionality, built around one simple device: the window. Bai’s two-dimensional, cut-and-stitched works resemble theater sets — small domestic interiors that open onto flattened yet unmistakable scenes: the horizon line of an ocean flanked by a single palm tree, the silhouette of a building, a half-moon suspended in a dark sky, or geometric trees rendered in bold colors that recall the formal clarity of the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. A major inspiration for the Alabama-born, Korean-American artist, that tradition sits alongside bojagi, the Korean practice of piecing and stitching wrapping cloths from scraps of fabric. With Bai’s new Hermès window for the brand’s Madison Avenue flagship in New York, her two-dimensional portals expand into three-dimensional space, transforming stitched apertures into architectural frameworks.

That attention to framing carries across Bai’s wider practice. Alongside textiles, she has spent more than a decade making sculptures cast from colored sand — works that resemble window frames or stretched canvases. Shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York and beyond, including presentations with Klaus von Nichtssagend, Fortnight Institute, Deanna Evans Projects, and Halsey McKay, these pieces extend her long-standing interest in illusion and structure.

Bai’s interest in thresholds and perception finds new scale in her Hermès commission. Starting from a collage of remnants gathered from her studio, the installation takes the form of a window within a window. Trees, buildings, and horses — a nod to Hermès’ equestrian heritage — assemble into a miniature village structured through planes of fabric, light, and shadow. Bai’s earlier works often centered on interior windows with only minimally described landscapes beyond. But in 2023, after a cancer diagnosis, she says her attention shifted outward and she wanted to focus on what lies beyond the frame. In a full-circle gesture, she shared in a conversation with Cooper Hewitt curator Alexandra Cunningham Cameron — held at the Madison Avenue store to mark the unveiling of the new window — that she purchased her first Hermès scarf after her diagnosis, a small luxury that helped her reclaim a sense of self in an uncertain moment.

Inspired by the history of painting in which windows function as illusionistic frames — and by a recent trip to Italy and the spatial logic of Renaissance perspective — Bai wanted to play with what is real and what is represented. “Is this actual light, or is this a representation of light? Is this an actual shadow, or a representation of one?” she asks of her new work. The confusion is intentional, a way to interrupt the flow of Madison Avenue and encourage people to stop and take notice. “That was my goal and my hope,” Bai says. “It’s a very quiet ambition, but I think to have someone stop and look and be present in the act of looking is no small thing.”