B ringing together exceptional works of art, design and luxury, Sotheby’s presents for the first time, Jay Ahr’s reinterpretation of Fernand Léger’s 1924 avant-garde film, Ballet Mécanique. Through the ballet of Hong Kong - a choreographed interplay of craftsmanship and Jay Ahr’s reimagined Rolls-Royce, Hermès, and Jean Prouvé design furniture - this selling exhibition gives form to a world of transformation.
For the designer and artist Jay Ahr, some objects are simply iconic. The Birkin and Kelly bags from Hermès. The Rolls-Royce Corniche Coupe. The SCAL bed designed by Jean Prouvé. The Keepall travel bag from Louis Vuitton.
These objects transcend their status as everyday items to become timeless cultural symbols. Drawing from the provenance of each piece, he imagines them imprinted with its own story, transforming them with craftsmanship and technology into unique works.
BALLET MÉCANIQUE is the first major exhibition dedicated to automotive works, handbag transformations, furniture, and film works of Jay Ahr. It is a choreography of the work of artisans, engineers, designers, and the mechanical parts that make up the car. Borrowing its name from Fernand Léger’s landmark 1924 avant-garde film, the exhibition is a celebration of the symmetry, texture, and kinetic energy of the object that hailed the arrival of modernity: the automobile. At the heart of the show are three of the seventy-two vintage Rolls-Royce Corniche Coupés he has collected, disassembled into over 70,000 mechanical parts, studied, re-engineered, restored, transformed, and reshaped according to his interpretation of the design language of its time. The result is an aesthetic and engineering feat, blurring the boundary between functional object and sculpture.
5-26 November 2026
Monday–Saturday | 11:00AM–7:00PM
Sunday & Public Holiday | 11:00AM–6:00PM
Sotheby's Maison, Hong Kong
Landmark Chater, 8 Connaught Road Central, Central
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In his collection of seventy-two transformed Rolls-Royce Corniche Coupés, Jay Ahr introduces for the first time in his work, a mechanical transformation as well as an aesthetic one. To achieve this, he’s built an atelier mécanique—a specialized workshop bringing together a team of master mechanics, engineers, artisans, and designers under a single roof.
The transformation of each car takes over a year to complete. The team begins by disassembling the vehicle into more than 70,000 individual parts, each of which are studied and catalogued. From there, every component, down to the smallest screw, is either restored or completely made from anew according to today’s technical standards. Stripped of their original function, these objects look jewel-like and sculptural in their own right, resembling industrial still-lifes.
Inside, Jay Ahr either restores the car’s original engine to pristine condition or installs a modern powertrain—delivering such a strong performance that acceleration feels like flight.
Taking inspiration only from design features from within the period in which the Corniche was manufactured, Jay Ahr remakes the entire interior cockpit and the car body. The back window is split, the sides have metal shark gills, and the body is shaped for a sportier look. The result is a transformed classic car that is an artefact for the future.
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Originally created in 1930 as a symbol of world travel, the Louis Vuitton Keepall is an iconic object reimagined by Jay Ahr as a canvas for global history and culture. Sourced from around the globe, each vintage bag in this collection is embroidered with the artistic traditions of its place of origin. A “U.S.S.R.” bag, sourced from Moscow in 1991, marks the dissolution of the Soviet Union with a distressed rendition of the U.S.S.R. flag. Other works feature embroidered Persian rug patterns, Japanese shunga erotic art (with one iteration censored, one not), and African tribal motifs. Through these transformations, Jay Ahr elevates the Keepall from a functional travel accessory to a living vessel of collective memory.
For Jay Ahr, a Hermès handbag is both a canvas for his distinctive visual language and a playground for techniques perfected over an eclectic career. Every piece in the collection is unique. Through a playful and inventive use of embroidery, embellishment, weaving, and woodwork, his practice invites us to reflect on national cultures, histories, and identities.
In his experimentations with form, Jay Ahr pushes the limits of leathercraft. In one series, he reimagines the basket bag through take-ami—the Japanese art of bamboo weaving—ingeniously substituting rattan for woven leather cord. Elsewhere, statuesque handbags rest on custom wooden plinths, their leather panels embroidered with patterns that mimic natural wood grain. In the "Wave" series, sculpted leather panels create dynamic crests and troughs across the bag’s surface.
For Jay Ahr, vintage Hermès handbags are living artifacts rich with history. His work poses questions of provenance and identity: When was a piece crafted? Where was it sourced? Who owned it? In his “Decades” series, he embroiders vintage Kelly bags with key events from their year of origin, including a 1976 piece paying homage to the birth of the first Apple computer. Elsewhere, handbags sourced from Japan feature embroidery replicating the fluid, organic effects of aizome—traditional Japanese indigo dyeing.
Jay Ahr has transformed a collection of Jean Prouvé’s iconic SCAL beds from the 1950s using Prouvé’s design language and his own. These beds were originally produced in the 1940s for hospitals, university dorms, and even prisons, reflecting Prouvé’s commitment to utilitarian design. In 1953, Charlotte Perriand introduced the innovative “tablette pivotante” in collaboration with Prouvé, adding a new function. Today, Jay Ahr has engineered four new constructions, including a retractable back-rest, turning the bed into a bench, a table, or the centrepiece of a lounge area.
Every piece bears an imprint of its material history. Working with a series of SCAL bed frames sourced from Cansado, Mali, Jay Ahr sets one with an aluminium panel inspired by the Cross of Agadez and another with embroidery inspired by the patterns of a Tuareg mat. In another series, glass-paneled beds are cast with the shadows of sculptures the artist Alexander Calder conceived as he corresponded with Jean Prouvé. These interventions are not merely decorative—they are narrative and cinematic. On beds Prouvé designed for a maison d'arrêt in Nancy, France, Jay Ahr invites us into the head of who might have once slept on it, as he engraves an imaginary prisoner’s angry grafitti onto the aluminium panel.
JAY AHR operates at the intersection of luxury, art, and design. Founded in Paris in 2005 by self-taught artist and designer Jonathan Riss—whose initials ("J.R.") give the studio its name—JAY AHR began as an edgy women's fashion label before evolving into a global multi-disciplinary studio. Today, JAY AHR is world-renowned for its masterful transformations of iconic ready-mades—from vintage Hermès Birkin, Kelly, and Constance bags to Rolls-Royce motorcars and Jean Prouvé SCAL beds—alongside groundbreaking work in industrial design, artwork, and architecture.
Jay Ahr is an artist and designer who specializes in the art of transformation. His creative and production process fuses artisanal techniques with state-of-the-art technology, working across a variety of mediums to craft unique, narrative-driven pieces.
Each of his pieces tell a story. Whether it’s using a series of vintage Hermes bags from the 1980s to tell the story of what happened in every year of that decade, or carve an imaginary prisoner’s scrawl on a collection of original Jean Prouve SCAL beds sourced from a defunct French prison, Jay Ahr invites us to travel with him through histories, civilizations, and worlds as he sees them. His collection of transformed Rolls-Royce Corniche Coupes represents a pinnacle in his career thus far—introducing for the first time a mechanical transformation as well as an aesthetic one.
Jay Ahr is an auteur of almost every physical medium imaginable, directly controlling every step of the production process with his designers, craftsmen, and engineers. His studio is a collection of specialized workshops across industries, among them textiles and leather, metalworking, wood, and most recently, automotive. This methodology allows him to re-imagine iconic luxury objects, creating pieces that transcend their original function and become singular works of art in their own right.
Through his innovative and interdisciplinary approach, Jay Ahr has established himself as a pioneer in the transformation of iconic luxury pieces. At a time when some of the most exciting cultural product is created in the interstices of the worlds of art, design, and fashion, Jay Ahr is a suis generis artist whose canvas is luxury itself.
