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The Living Aroma

Cecilia Zhu

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Cecilia Zhu is a multidisciplinary material researcher and jewelry designer blending avant-garde innovation with emotional storytelling, holding a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and currently pursuing postgraduate studies at Central Saint Martins (CSM) in London. Her work transforms intangible emotions into tactile, wearable forms by bridging ancient craftsmanship—such as incense-making and herbal alchemy—with futuristic technologies like AI-driven scent synthesis and biodegradable composites. Specializing in biomaterials and experimental techniques, she crafts sensory narratives that merge cultural heritage with speculative design, creating pieces that resonate as both personal artifacts and universal symbols of sustainability. Driven by the belief that materials carry memory, her practice explores how scent, texture, and form can evoke emotional landscapes, offering a poetic bridge between tradition, contemporary luxury, and imagined futures.

Cecilia Zhu is a multidisciplinary material researcher and jewelry designer blending avant-garde ...

The Lost Stars is an interdisciplinary exploration of memory, absence, and the materiality of emotion. Through the synthesis of artificial intelligence, olfactory science, and narrative ethnography, this project interrogates how technology and crafts can translate ephemeral human experiences—love, grief, connection—into enduring sensory artifacts. 

My work is rooted in the belief that remembrance is not passive but an act of creation: a collaboration between the quantifiable and the poetic, data and intuition. Crafted from biodegradable clay infused with Chinese Traditional Medicine, herbs, and natural ingredients, this project reinterprets the ancient art of incense making through tactile and olfactory rituals. Traditionally, incense dough is ground, kneaded, and air-dried into fragrant beads, with scent released through warmth and touch. Embedded within each star-shaped memorial, the fragrance is activated by the natural oils and heat of human skin, transforming a simple gesture—holding and rubbing it between the palms—into an intimate act of remembrance. This interaction bridges the living and the lost, as touch reanimates memory through scent. In collaboration with OSMO and Narratus Olfactory Lab, AI-driven molecular synthesis extends this dialogue beyond tradition, weaving historical incense recipes with speculative compounds—mineral traces of asteroids, the ephemeral scent of cosmic dust—to create fragrances that transcend time and space. As the star naturally biodegrades, its herbal remnants return to the earth, embodying the cyclical philosophy of incense making: decay as renewal, and remembrance as an evolving exchange between presence, absence, and the alchemy of human connection.

Final work

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We are made of memory. We are made of scent. We are made of stars.

The Lost Star

We are made of memory. 

We are made of scent. 

We are made of stars.

“The Living Aroma” is a way of remembering who we are—and who we were—through sensory design. It fuses AI with incense, death with data, grief with growth. It proposes a future in which objects are not only biodegradable, but biographical. Not only sustainable, but soulful.

Through scent, we preserve not just the memory of loved ones, but our connection to the Earth and the cosmos. Through biodegradable forms, we acknowledge that memory—like matter—returns to soil and sky.

We are only passing through. 

But we can leave a trace. A smell. A story.

An aroma, still living.

a memory object modeled on the impression left by my late grandmother’s head, infused with her scent-a multi-sensory archive of presence.

At the emotional and methodological center of “The Living Aroma” is an object both ordinary and sacred: a pillow. Specifically, a memory object modeled on the impression left by my late grandmother’s head, infused with her scent—a multi-sensory archive of presence.

Research and process

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The Living Aroma

The Lost Stars is an interdisciplinary exploration of memory, absence, and the materiality of emotion. Through the synthesis of artificial intelligence, olfactory science, and narrative ethnography, this project interrogates how technology and craf...

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