Our Story
"reveal the plain, embrace the simple." (Tao Te Ching)
XIANSU is an Eastern art-of-living brand founded in Los Angeles. We work alongside master artisans of China's intangible cultural heritage — Blanc de Chine porcelain and Yongchun lacquer basketry, carried forward by the makers and families who practice these crafts. Incense is simply how we mark the time.
What we ask of every object
White · Clarity · Precision · Softness
These four qualities guide the objects we choose and make.
White is the gentle light of porcelain, and the space we leave in daily life.
Clarity is a clean form and measured ornament, allowing the material itself to be seen.
Precision is care for line, proportion and finish, down to details that may go unnoticed.
Softness is a fine, gentle feel in the hand, from the surface of an object to the paper that wraps it.
We hope each work rewards a lingering look and years of touch and use.
The porcelain
Dehua white porcelain is known as Blanc de Chine. Our collection brings together works by Chen Liling and Chen Gong and original XIANSU designs, made at the Chen Family Porcelain Studio in Dehua. Each product page identifies the creator, making process and firing version. XIANSU also documents and supports the revival of the Taiping Gong Kiln; special firing schedules are confirmed separately.
The lacquer basket
The Yongchun lacquer basket — a provincial intangible cultural heritage of Fujian dating to the Ming Zhengde era, more than five hundred years ago — is woven from bamboo, layered with ramie and raw lacquer, relief-carved and gilded by hand, through five craft disciplines and thirty-three processes.
The incense
Our incense comes from Dapu in Yongchun, Fujian. The key ingredients, form and use of each fragrance are described on its product page. Lighting incense marks a small interval in the day to spend quietly with yourself.
The guardian and the dandelion
XIANSU is founded by Dandelion Lin Pictures, whose emblem is a lion gently blowing a dandelion. Our Jin Mao Hou censer — the golden-maned, lion-like guardian of Chinese myth — is its kin: as smoke rises from the beast's mouth, so the seeds travel far, and so is our wish: to carry all that is beautiful, in things and in spirit, to every corner of the world.
A Note from the Founder
In painting, I study light. In film, I hold a moment in time. Light falling across a wall, a figure turning away, a silence left unbroken: any of these can make me pause. I want to give these impressions a form, so that someone else might find something of themselves within them.
Whether through the images in my films, the oil paintings on my easel or the words I write, I am simply sharing my sense of beauty, using the life I have to take an impression of the time I live in.
XIANSU continues this work. Here, composition enters daily life, and time takes on a texture we can touch. The scent of incense, the light on white porcelain, the warmth of lacquerware in the hand: these are things I want to spend time with, and to share.
I value the eye and the touch a maker develops over decades, and the devotion that carries a craft from one generation to the next. Years of practice settle into a curve, a layer of lacquer, a finishing gesture we may barely notice. When we bring a work home, that time becomes part of our own lives.
I hope the works we offer will remain close for many years, passing from one person's daily rituals into a family's memories, gathering traces of those who use, cherish and eventually pass them on.
In an age that urges us forward, I still choose to pause for beauty. To wait for a fine work, and to make room for it in our lives for years to come, is one way of honouring the life we have.
— Dandelion Lin, Founder of XIANSU
Your time, returned.