A Chinese Beauty Brand Threw a Party Where Guests Meditated, Then Danced

Most beauty exhibitions want you to look at things. herbeast's wants you to walk through seven days of your life and come out cleaner on the other side.

The Chinese herbal skincare brand — official name: Dongbian Yeshou, or "herbeast'" — opened
Untamed, Unbound
(野力无边) at Shanghai's Rockbund complex in late June, marking five years since its founding. But calling it a "brand retrospective" undersells what's actually happening inside.

The exhibition also serves as the launch for
Jing Zhi Ye
(净之野, roughly "Field of Purity"), a new body-and-mind care line built around one of the more interesting premises in beauty right now: that modern life demands not just moisturizing, but purifying — and that the two aren't the same thing.

The line draws inspiration from plants and minerals that thrive in extreme, unpolluted environments, translating that energy into products designed to be felt, breathed, and absorbed as daily ritual. To introduce it, the brand built seven walk-through chambers organized around the concept of a "seven-day" container — a structure that guides visitors through water, foam, botanical scent, and texture, essentially reconstructing a sense of order through the senses.

That's where sculptor Jiang Sheng enters. In a collaboration that signals how seriously herbeast takes its conceptual architecture, Jiang — known for contemporary Buddhist-influenced sculpture — created vessels for the collection anchored in two classical references: the Guanyin "pure vase" (观音净瓶) and the five-element pagoda (五轮塔), representing earth, water, fire, wind, and space. The objects aren't decorative. They're positioned as mediators between body, mind, and natural order — hardware for a ritual most skincare brands don't even acknowledge exists.

The exhibition further unfolds in four chapters — "Borderless," "Boundless," "Edgeless," and "Boundless Purity" — tracing the brand's journey from herbal research to cross-disciplinary collaborations to community-rooted sustainability work. A modular USM Haller system threads through the "Dongbian Parlor" and "Media Lab" spaces, holding product displays, archival materials, and reading selections in a framework designed to grow with the brand rather than contain it.

Two forums extended the conversation beyond the displays. The first, "Untamed, Unbound," brought together founder He Yi with a café-and-cultural-space founder, an architect, and a photographer to discuss how to reclaim vitality in an era of constraint. The second, "Gradually Entering Purity," gathered Jiang Sheng, a fragrance atelier founder, and curator Simone Chen to unpack what "cleanliness" means when it's not just about hygiene — but about emotional and spiritual recalibration.

Then, on opening night, the brand co-hosted a "Night Walking Meditation" party with cultural collective MANIFESTO. Guests didn't just sip and scan — they moved through the space in a practice that turned the retrospective into something closer to a communal exhale.

Five years in, herbeast is making a case that's easy to miss if you only read the product labels: that Chinese herbal tradition, in the right hands, isn't folk nostalgia or "ancient wisdom" marketing fluff. It's living material for designing how a person moves through their day, their body, and their head.

Untamed, Unbound
runs at Rockbund, Shanghai. The products are real. The ritual is the point.