Lisha Bai Transforms Hermès Windows Into a Prismatic Village of Light

Windows sit at the heart of Lisha Bai’s atmospheric textile collages. The New York artist, who studied painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art, cuts and stitches fabric into spare geometric compositions that suggest panes set within frames or parted curtains, conjuring twilit scenes of fading sunsets or glowing skies glimpsed from indoors. For her latest commission, that motif takes on deeper meaning. Bai has reimagined the lavish shop windows of Hermès on New York’s Upper East Side into a window within a window, translating her language of cut and sewn textile into new dimensions. Planes of saturated color gather to form an abstract village composed of prismatic facets, with light embedded directly into the installation’s structure.

The opportunity arrived at an auspicious moment. “I had just finished work for a show and was spending time in the studio experimenting with scraps of fabric that had accumulated around me,” Bai says. “Out of that collage of remnants, a kind of village began to emerge, with shapes, trees, and structures framed by a window.” When Jesse Davis, who oversees the maison’s window displays, reached out about a collaboration around the theme “Venture Beyond,” Bai immediately seized upon the concept’s potential to push her practice into exciting new territory. “I began to imagine this collage not simply as an image, but as a space.”

Expanding her method of cutting and stitching allowed the composition to expand into a 3-D landscape of abstract planes that viewers encounter beyond the picture frame, but her biggest focus became the innate behavior of light. “I became interested in how light meets and breaks across different planes—how it bends, creates shadows, and fragments form,” Bai explains. “Although the landscape is imagined, I wanted the light to feel grounded and specific, rooted in lived experiences of light in the world.”

To realize that, Bai looked inward. She draws sustained inspiration from bojagi, the traditional Korean patchwork cloth, and from the quilts of Gee’s Bend, the boldly abstract textiles created by Black women in rural Alabama. Both practices trace back to her experience as a Korean American growing up in the Southern state. “Their use of color and the rhythmic balance of their compositions have been a lasting influence,” Bai explains. “In the Gee’s Bend quilts especially, color and form generate a sense of movement that feels almost animated, pushing against the limits of their material structure.” That vitality ultimately guided her careful treatment of the village’s prismatic planes and glowing volumes.

“It’s rare to have the support and resources to create an entire world of your own making, and that felt like a real gift,” Bai says, noting how the installation became an exercise in restraint. “It became a balancing act of keeping my intentions at the forefront so I didn’t get lost in what was possible.” What emerged from that equilibrium now casts a saturated glow across Madison Avenue, offering passersby a welcome burst of color during the city’s coldest months.