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It’s been 20 years since high jewelry artist, Cindy Chao, started her eponymous jewelry brand, Cindy Chao the Art Jewel, with $100,000 of her own money. During this time her gem-encrusted, three-dimensional jewels have made appearances at international auctions, in world class museums and worn by some of the world’s most famous women on international red carpets. The final journey for many of her one-of-a-kind creations is in the collections of the some of the world’s most important art and jewelry connoisseurs, or as bejeweled adornment on some of the world’s wealthiest women and men.
To celebrate her success over the years, Chao will host her first exhibition in Taipei, her lifelong home. The installment titled, “Twenty Years in Art: A Retrospective Journey,” will be at the Fubon Art Pavilion, November 24-26. The exhibition is open to the public by appointment.
This exhibition delves deeply into Chao’s artistic heritage, exploring her creations imbued with what she describes as her three core elements: “architectural, sculptural, and organic.” It unfolds as a journey through time, revealing the evolution of her artistry. For this exhibition, Chao borrowed important pieces from her collectors, many of which are being showcased in Taiwan for the first time.
Notable works include the Ballerina Butterfly Brooch , a collaborative piece created over two years with actress Sarah Jessica Parker in 2014. Another masterpiece is the Winter Leaves Necklace , which won the Outstanding Exhibit Award at the Masterpiece London Art Fair in 2019. Known for its visual impact, this piece also highlights the brand’s expertise in titanium, making the necklace as light as real leaves.
Another piece of importance in this retrospective is Chao’s Cardamom Brooch, which features an oval-shaped cabochon Colombian emerald of approximately 81 carats, surrounded by yellow diamonds, brown diamonds, tsavorites, demantoids, color-changing garnets, alexandrites and green sapphires. The exhibition also includes pieces from her 20th anniversary collection , which Chao unveiled in June. The Lumiere Feather Brooch again uses the lightness of titanium to present a leaf that is ultra-light and sparking with a 5-carat pear-shaped fancy intense yellow diamond, enhanced further with diamonds, and orange and pink sapphires.
All these pieces are part of Chao’s semi-annual “Four Seasons” collection, which consists of her “Black Label Masterpieces,” limited to 36 per year. Her most iconic creations are her butterfly brooches, which best show how she has evolved as an artist over the years. She sold her first butterfly brooch, the Ruby Butterfly Brooch in 2008 for $86,000.
Today, her Black Label Masterpieces can command prices beyond $10 million. “I was nobody and just started my business and it was a challenge,” she said in a candid 2017 interview . “A client wanted to buy the first butterfly.
I was almost bankrupted. I sold it to her for $86,000. At the time it was huge money.
” While that first butterfly is modest compared to her current creations, in a 2020 interview , she credits this brooch, which features two non-heated baroque Burmese rubies, with saving her business. “In my first few years I was not successful and was frustrated with myself,” Chao said. “I thought, ‘my God, if this is going to be the last piece I was going to make, what is it going to be?’ I just felt like I was a butterfly.
They are so beautiful and they live so briefly. I decided to make a butterfly because that was my mood at that moment.” This brooch will not be part of the three-day exhibition in Taipei.
That’s because it is now part of the permanent collection in the prestigious Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD) in Paris..
