What unfolds in this publication is a conversation with a place, about a place, and with the people shaped by it. At the heart of this dialogue stands the West Lake in Hangzhou—a city where tradition and modernity walk side by side. Beneath its surface of high-speed rail lines and seamless connectivity lies a slower rhythm, one where culture has not only been preserved but continues to breathe. Like an Open Fold, this encounter reveals the surfaces we touch—creases as paths, impressions as memories—offering a shared space between exposure and reflection. This first edition of Whitelies Index brings together four artists in a shared encounter with that rhythm, exploring how this landscape informs and transforms our practice.

The CHANEL Métiers d’Art Show was staged here in December 2024—not merely as a runway event—but as a sensory and environmental composition. As the day faded into dusk, the sun’s final trace dissolved into the lake, and stillness settled. Then: the sound of drums. Light emerged not from the sky but from within the landscape itself. In this moment, reality gave way to a dream—like stepping into the otherworld of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, just as night falls over the sleepy onsen town. The runway became a theater embedded in the scenery—a bridge between the seen and the imagined.

As with everything Whitelies has stood for as a magazine in the past, this first book publication under our new direction has a visual and cultural exchange at its heart—a multi-layered conversation between artists and landscapes, between the tangible and the invisible. Between reality and a dream.