Hong Kong artist’s butterfly-covered dress at British Museum still pulling in the crowds five years on

It may have been collected by the British Museum five years ago now but Hong Kong artist Caroline Cheng’s Prosperity (2012), a traditional Chinese dress covered in more than 25,000 delicate porcelain butterflies, is still drawing crowds at the prestigious cultural institution in London.

“The number of Chinese visitors [to the British Museum] over the New Year holiday [this year] exceeded all expectations,” says Jessica Harrison-Hall, curator and Asian art expert at the London institution and the person responsible for the museum’s Chinese ceramics collection. “Caroline Cheng’s sculpture is the centrepiece of our 20th- and 21st-century area of the gallery.”

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The museum received 6.2 million visitors in 2016/17. It is often ranked as the leading tourist attraction in the British capital and one of the most visited museums in the UK.

Cheng’s work – one in a series of dresses all called Prosperity – sits with other artworks in the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery of China and South Asia, which reopened in December 2017 after a two-year refurbishment. The extensive collection takes visitors through Chinese history from 5,000BC to the present day.

The title of Cheng’s dress series is a play on the Chinese word fu, which means “prosperity” but also sounds like the word for “clothing” in Mandarin. The inspiration came from her first visit to the ancient pottery-making town of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province in 1998 and her encounters with local artisans there.

“I saw all these craftsmen making little butterflies, bees, dragonflies and flowers but in a cheap, ugly design,” recalls Cheng, who is now based in the city of Dali in Yunnan Province. “I could make 20 of those a day, but these people could make 1,000 – the craftsmanship of Jingdezhen porcelain is incredible.”