Janice Blackburn, a curator and design collector who has an indefatigable excitement about the young designers she discovers, declares: “This is by far the hardest thing I have ever done.” On Friday she will open Unfolding Landscape, the first western show of work by graduates from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing’s prestigious design school, at Sotheby’s in London. The selling exhibition runs until November 8.

Chinese arts and crafts are currently the focus of intense global interest. But while the west has become familiar with the best Chinese fine art and photography over the past 10 years, Chinese design has remained hidden from view. There have been intriguing glimpses: from time to time talented students pass through the Royal College of Art in London, and through the generosity of Pearl Lam, a Hong Kong heiress, collector and curator who has been showing Chinese design alongside art at fairs in London, Paris, Miami and New York for nearly two decades, the V&A owns four “deconstructed” chairs by Shao Fan, a painter, sculptor and designer who pioneered the concept of reconstructive furniture with Ai Weiwei.

Blackburn’s speciality is discovering “what’s going on in parts of the world less obvious for design”. She has brought graduates from Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design to Sotheby’s, as well as graduates of the renowned Eindhoven Academy in Holland. An introduction to Professor Min Wang, dean of the CAFA design school, enabled her to visit the school in March and, with the help of Ben Hughes, a visiting professor of industrial design from Central Saint Martins, select a show of CAFA graduates to bring to London.