While all of La Prairie’s products represent luxury, the brand’s new Pure Gold collection does that and so much more. Aside from the rich formulas and gorgeous packaging, La Prairie’s latest launch—it’s inspired by golden hour in the crown of the Swiss Alps—is in collaboration with artist Carla Chan, who is highlighting the intersection between beauty, art and nature in her augmented reality piece, Fading Space of Dawn. Chan first debuted this artistic piece—it was created after Chan was invited for an artistic residency at La Becque in Montreux, a prestigious Art Residency located on Switzerland’s lac Léman—at The Frieze New York last month, a round-two debut after her first art collaboration with the brand at the same museum last year.
Formally known as the Pure Gold Nocturnal Ritual, the new gold-lined items includes gloriously rich and deeply hydrating products from Pure Gold Radiance Eye Cream ($665), which claims to minimize the appearance of fine lines and reduce the appearance of puffiness, to its latest innovation, Pure Gold Radiance Nocturnal Balm ($975), a comforting balm that transforms dehydrated skin into a revitalized and restored dream.
In addition to the immersive experience Chan created with Fading Space of Dawn, the artist taps blockchain technology to create another nature-inspired piece, Space Beyond. This NFT piece is composed of 366 editions, one for each day of the year. This piece itself is ever-changing, just as the weather is, and it transforms numbers into a digital form of weather, which Chan says “blurs the lines between what is real and what is imagined.”
Chan tells us that having had two separate artist collaborations with La Prairie has been an honor. “In our last collaboration, we used the mountains as our inspiration and this time it’s the lake, which is a super big contrast—the glacial landscape versus the peaceful, smooth lake. I find a lot of inspiration from this contrast, and I am also interested in how weather can become more and more extreme, depending on the climate. Just like we have no control over a glacier melting, we cannot change or reverse the weather either, so this is why we incorporated weather into the launch. In the second piece of work, which is also inspired by nature, we’re also portraying change. In this piece, the future is dictating how the art will look.”
“When Carla was at La Becque, she spent time in the mountains, feeling the rocks and the warmth and watching as the sun changed, taking the darkness away,” says manager of North America education for La Prairie, Daniel Bragdon. “She transformed this into digital media, and for the first time, we have created NFTs in the form of digital art that lives forever, which can be purchased in the form of crypto currency. The art can also be purchased with a credit card. The entire collection will be unveiled at Art Basel Hong Kong.”
While Chan finds her inspiration for her artwork in nature, she says that nature actually scares her when she isn’t working on an artistic piece. “I don’t like nature, I’m actually a non-nature person! I like the city, I like industrial. I actually feel very scared when I’m in nature. I once had a panic attack when I was in a remote landscape outside of Moscow—I felt so scared. However, this is also why I am very interested in this topic. I like to connect nature with what I’m used to, which is concrete cities. This contradiction is where I find my artistic style.”
Chan spends most of her time working, but a good artist needs to reset now and then. “I really like to daydream. Sometimes when I really want to calm myself, I just look at an empty wall. I’m not the kind of person that likes to take a walk or something, I moreso like to create a space for myself and get into that space. That makes me more calm and more relaxed. Zoning out is the best moment. That’s why I also think a lot of my work is dealing with space that is minimal, a bit like the NFT work I did. It’s really about the color of space and I think that represents a lot of my time when I imagine how I actually see things through an imaginative space.”
