How do you take a dying artform and bring it back to life? That's the theme of one of China's contributions to this year's London Craft Week. The festival now attracts a quarter of a million visitors each year highlighting a wide range of craft skills from around the world. 

Anson Lai is a Hong Kong based goldsmith demonstrating the art of gilding at the China exhibition during London Craft week.

Gold Leaf has long been used in China in temples and on Buddha statues.  For the past year he has been working in collaboration with a leading traditional gilder. Now Anson Lai is using the gold as a decorative artform for the 3D printed flowers he designed.

"I think it's a really transformative journey for me because I learned and I know about the history and the culture of the gilding in Hong Kong. So we collaborate and we did it together," Lai explained.

London Craft Week is an annual city-wide festival celebrating exceptional craftmanship across a wide range of disciplines from around the world.

China is a regular contributor and this year's theme, curated by Hong Kong based charity Crafts on Peel, is about reviving, reinterpreting and perpetuating ancestral Chinese crafts. They did so by providing scholarships to up and coming designers to collaborate with some of China's most skilled conventional craftsmen.

Penelope Luk, is curator and creative director of Crafts on Peel.

"We believe it is so important in the modern days to keep these traditional artistry alive. So by simply preserving it, it may not work this way. So we believe by reinterpreting and also perpetuating through exchange of techniques, that will be one of the best way to keep it alive," she explained.

Another of the stands has a large-scale woven installation created by  contemporary textile designer, Elaine Yan Ling Ng, in collaboration with one of China's most accomplished master embroiderers from Guangzhou. The art form originated in Guangdong province during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Renowned for its vibrant colors it was widely exported to Europe during the Ming era (1368 -1644).

"Its so important and crucial to keep traditional work alive, because most of the time in China, in Chinese culture, a lot of the traditional work has been seen as souvenirs trade" Yan Ling Ng told CGTN. "So that's one of the objectives of the collaboration. How do we integrate traditional Chinese embroidery into a living space?"

Another exhibit involved galvanized steel. It was best known in Hong Kong for making everyday objects like buckets. Here its being used to create sculptural art, such as a sail boat in the sea surrounded by fish.

 So what do visitors make of these cross cultural works?

Stuart Maciver, visiting the exhibition was impressed.

"In a world where we're ever increasingly digital, this is an interesting blend between the digital arts, because precision is required in order to be able to get to a finished shape, and taking the traditional skill sets, which are sort of disappearing, really, in this age of sort of mass automation." Maciver said.

Daniel Marcus was another visitor.

"The idea of taking traditional craft and mixing modern materials, or maybe even techniques with it. I like that idea. I think that's great; so very original."

The organizers hope that such collaborations will help keep these heritage crafts alive for generations to come.