Rémy Martin Unveils Lunar New Year Collaboration With Top-Ranked Artist Xue Song
The House of Rémy Martin has announced an exceptional partnership with renowned Chinese artist Xue Song to celebrate the Lunar New Year. To mark the arrival of the Year of the Horse, Xue Song has created a new artwork in collaboration with Rémy Martin, featuring the Centaur – the House’s emblem – which has inspired a series of limited-edition Lunar New Year gift boxes for Rémy Martin XO and VSOP.
Xue Song is a 2024 Hurun Top 100 Chinese artist with a unique Pop Art style that transforms disparate printed fragments into meaningful images. Inspired by the idea of the Centaur paving the way, Xue has fused collage and Chinese ink to create his 1.8m x 1.2m masterpiece, which features the Centaur leading a pack of horses into the future. The horse represents strength, speed and perseverance in the Chinese zodiac, while the Centaur connects the earth and skies, with its feet on the ground and head looking to the stars.
Xue Song’s vivid, symbolic artwork has galloped onto special edition bottles and gift boxes for Lunar New Year 2026. Highly collectible limited-edition presentations of Rémy Martin XO and Rémy Martin VSOP are on shelf now in the travel retail channel.
The travel retail roll-out of the Rémy Martin 2026 LNY limited editions is being supported by a series of high-profile activations in leading airport locations. These include Hong Kong, Singapore, London Heathrow, Dubai, Taiwan, Osaka, Bangkok, Melbourne and Istanbul, among others.
ENHANCING THE CONSUMER JOURNEY
The consumer journey is thoughtfully curated across multiple touchpoints that include impactful in-store activations and eye-catching merchandising and product displays. In selected markets, the journey is further elevated with the traditional red Hongbao envelopes featuring Xue Song’s LNY limited edition design elements as a gift for purchasing customers. The shopping experience is also reinforced through coordinated communications developed in collaboration with retail partners, ensuring storytelling and visibility across retail channels.
To enhance engagement, the activations feature a Lunar New Year ritual experience, which invites shoppers to create a personalised greeting card, crafted using woodblock stamps and Chinese calligraphy. Shoppers are guided to create their own spring couplet with the campaign’s tagline – 邑马当先 (Centaur Paving the Way), to convey blessings of prosperity and auspicious beginnings, alongside custom-designed motifs that fuse the key design elements of the artist collaboration.
“For Chinese travellers, Lunar New Year represents a peak period for premium gifting, and cognac naturally plays a central role in these celebratory occasions,” noted Rémy Cointreau CEO Global Travel Retail Fida Bou Chabke. “It is therefore a strategic priority for us to amplify the visibility and desirability of the House of Rémy Martin within the global travel retail environment during this holiday season.
“By activating strongly during this high-impact period, we aim not only to reinforce our leadership in cognac, but also to deepen our cultural relevance with travelling consumers. The Rémy Martin X Xue Song collaboration reflects our long-term vision: investing in bold, creative expressions that speak to a new generation while remaining true to our heritage, and fully unlocking the commercial potential of critical consumption moments.”
THE 2026 LUNAR NEW YEAR COLLECTION
The energy and symbolism of Xue Song’s painting have given Rémy Martin XO a festive update. Spirited stallions race behind the golden Centaur on the front of the highly detailed gift box, embossed in glowing metallics against Xue Song’s vibrant red collage. The box slides open to reveal the gift inside, set within a mythical landscape of clouds, bamboo and rocks.
The limited-edition XO decanter and neck collar are decorated with Xue Song’s freshly rendered golden Centaur and colourful elements of his painting, creating an instant collectible to be enjoyed for years to come. Turn the box around to see the full artwork unveiled. At the pinnacle of the Rémy Martin collection, XO is the signature of the Cellar Master, who draws from hundreds of eaux-de-vie to create a cognac of exceptional aromatic complexity.
Good luck and best wishes are captured in the festive limited-edition Rémy Martin VSOP. Ushering in the Year of the Horse, the frosted glass bottle is heightened with a unique label and gift box decorated and embossed with Xue Song’s elegant collage, ideal for giving, celebrating or collecting. As the first VSOP Cognac Fine Champagne ever created, Rémy Martin VSOP is an elegant expression of the Maison’s savoir-faire.
“An imaginative harmony of tradition and modernity, Xue Song’s bold artwork layers the storied heritage of our House with the elegance and rich symbolism of Asia,” noted Rémy Martin General Manager Amaury Vinclet. “Using a rich fusion of colour and collage, he magnificently portrays the concept of taking the lead. At the head of the herd, the Rémy Martin Centaur paves the way, striving towards excellence, ushering in an exciting year of infinite possibilities and positivity.”
ENDS
Media contact: Rebecca Mann, Essential Communications. Tel: +44 (0) 7973 933845
Email: rebecca@essencompr.com
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in 1965 in Dangshan, China, Xue Song is a highly collectible contemporary artist who set out “to break Chinese tradition and surpass western modernism”. He found his unique voice after a fire burned down his studio, leading him to incorporate charred remains of his art, literature and belongings into his work. The artist is now known for highly symbolic colorful collages fusing remnants of classical Chinese artworks with Western pop culture references, playing with the tension between high and low, East and West, mass and singular, traditional craft and throwaway culture. “Every year, I cut from maybe a thousand books and piles of old newspapers and photographs searching for the right images.”
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
Xue Song’s Lunar New Year masterwork is meticulously built from collaged pieces of Rémy Martin’s history. Close inspection reveals images from the brand’s Archives, alongside scenes from the Maison and terroir, to embed layers of meaning and symbolism.
The artwork depicts a herd of five horses led by the Rémy Martin Centaur, echoing the House tagline for 2026Lunar New Year, ‘The Centaur is paving the way’. The hooved creatures race over an auspicious red backdrop, surrounded by bamboo shoots announcing the arrival of spring and vitality, through clouds, over rivers of water, with the earth representing Rémy Martin’s prized winegrowing terroir in Petite and Grande Champagne in Cognac. Guided by the Centaur’s sparkling golden javelin, the herd gallops upwards towards the sky, embodying the House motto, ‘Feet on the ground, head in the stars’.
ABOUT RÉMY MARTIN
Since 1724, the house of Rémy Martin has produced premium spirits that consistently appeal to the world’s most discerning connoisseurs. A profound love of the land, a continuity of family ownership and a passionate commitment to excellence has sustained Rémy Martin for nearly three centuries. As a result of its masterful production and generations of tradition in Cognac, Rémy Martin today produces Cognacs Fine Champagne, including Rémy Martin® XO, Rémy Martin® Tercet, Rémy Martin 1738 Accord Royal® Rémy Martin Club® and Rémy Martin® V.S.O.P. For additional information, visit www.RémyMartin.com.
ABOUT RÉMY COINTREAU
All around the world, there are clients seeking exceptional experiences; clients for whom a wide range of terroirs means a variety of flavors. Their exacting standards are proportional to our expertise – the finely-honed skills that we pass down from generation to generation. The time these clients devote to drinking our products is a tribute to all those who have worked to develop them. It is for these men and women that Rémy Cointreau, a family-owned French Group, protects its terroirs, cultivates exceptional multi-centenary spirits and undertakes to preserve their eternal modernity. The Group’s portfolio includes 14 singular brands, such as the Rémy Martin and LOUIS XIII cognacs, and Cointreau liqueur. Rémy Cointreau has a single ambition: becoming the world leader in exceptional spirits. To this end, it relies on the commitment and creativity of its 1,943 employees and on its distribution subsidiaries established in the Group’s strategic markets. Rémy Cointreau is listed on Euronext Paris.
ABOUT RÉMY COINTREAU GLOBAL TRAVEL RETAIL
Rémy Cointreau Global Travel Retail specializes in accelerating the growth of the brand portfolio within the strategic global travel retail and duty-free channel. Headquartered in Singapore, Rémy Cointreau Global Travel Retail aspires to craft an exceptional journey for every traveling client across key global touchpoints including airports, ferries, airlines, and border stores.
For more information, please visit: https://www.remy-cointreau.com
