Bamboo Slips: A Zen-Inspired Liquor Packaging Revolution

Qianying Niu's Award-Winning Design Merges Culture, Sustainability, and Elegance

Qianying Niu's Bamboo Slips is a liquor packaging design that stands out for its uniqueness and cultural depth. The design draws inspiration from Zen, using black as the main color to emphasize purity and profoundness. The packaging material is bamboo slips, a nod to ancient Chinese culture. Opening the package is akin to unrolling a bamboo slip, revealing a Chinese poem, The Decree of Wine, carved within. This design seamlessly merges the cultural reading experience with the purity and excellence of the liquor, offering a rich narrative with every sip.

What sets Bamboo Slips apart is its non-label design, a first in the Chinese liquor industry. The materials used are sustainable and reusable, addressing the recycling dilemma commonly faced in the liquor industry. The design aims to revive the reading and drinking cultures central to Asian society by blending bamboo slips, calligraphy, and a carefully orchestrated bottle shape. It is a harmonious fusion of history, ancient Chinese calligraphy, sustainable materials, and Zen culture.

The realization of this design involved wrapping bamboo slips around a delicately crafted Chinese liquor bottle. The technical specifications of the design are 150mm*120mm*300mm. The design was conceptualized in Paris in August 2022 and completed in Shanghai in November 2022. The design tags include Liquor, Packaging, Liquor Packaging, Creative Packaging, Chinese Bamboo Slips, and No-Label Design.

The design is based on two motifs: bamboo slips used by ancestors to document and spread Chinese musical and ritual culture in a paper-lacking era, and the Cang-Shan liquor distillation process that requires years to distill, echoing the ancient philosophy that rewards come with patience. Overcoming the creative challenge of using bamboo slips to blend culture, Zen, and sustainability, Qianying Niu has created a design that is both innovative and respectful of tradition.

Qianying Niu's Bamboo Slips design has been recognized with the Silver A' Packaging Design Award in 2023. This award is given to top-of-the-line, creative, and professionally remarkable designs that demonstrate outstanding expertise and innovation. These designs, admired for their strong technical characteristics and splendid artistic skill, showcase a remarkable level of excellence and introduce positive feelings, amazement, and wonder.