To avoid the large influx of visitors during the Paris Olympics, major brands completed their most prestigious high jewelry releases by the end of June this year.
As a member of the French Haute Couture and Fashion Federation, jewelry artist Anna Hu’s haute couture jewelry brand ANNA HU HAUTE JOAILLERIE returned to its home in Paris. The brand showcased 10 pieces under the theme “Blossoming Melodies, Timeless Elegance,” drawing inspiration from butterflies and flowers.
While flora and fauna are typically the protagonists of “naturalism,” Anna’s works employ titanium, aluminum, and even nano-ceramics to express these themes. Craftsmen skillfully balance force and control angles, hand-hammering metal bases to reveal the complex curled forms of flower petals. The reverse sides of the pieces are hand-brushed, creating lifelike, delicate textures. Anodizing coloring techniques endow the works with modern, electric hues.
In the “world’s jewelry box” of Place Vendôme, Anna’s creations stand out in the sea of high jewelry with a distinct personal style, exuding an ineffable Eastern charm.
Right: ANNA HU Purple Mist Fairy Peony Brooch
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Anna was born into a family of intellectuals. Her father was passionate about Chinese classical culture, excelling in Go and calligraphy. Her “tiger mom” valued education above all else. Even after becoming a diamond wholesaler by chance, her father maintained the free-spirited temperament of a scholar and nurtured his children’s natural inclinations. Young Anna often played with her father’s diamonds as toys.
Anna dreamed of becoming a cellist from an early age, with the competitive young woman winning various music awards. At 20, while preparing for an important international competition, she practiced cello for 8 hours daily, suddenly developing shoulder tendonitis that ended her professional performance career.
Encouraged by her father, Anna enrolled in GIA courses during her life’s low point. Unexpectedly, this opened a new door. Her middle school experiences with clay sculpting and visual arts resonated with the gemstones before her, immediately evoking the musical notes she knew so well.
How did her obsession with classical music transform into a passion for jewelry? Anna admires Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, who researched how to express musical feelings through painting.
At a jewelry forum, Anna said: “An inspiration burst in my mind – I could use gemstones to capture a moment, like a film still, preserving that instant’s feeling.” If jewelry is visual art, the cello is performing art; the crystallization of “moments of emotion” leads to the same destination by different paths.
From then on, there was no turning back. She not only obtained the GIA Graduate Gemologist certification in gemstone identification and jewelry design but also completed all jewelry design courses at FIT New York, earning formal credits. Later, she obtained dual master’s degrees in art from Parsons School of Design and Columbia University, becoming a quintessential “academic” jewelry artist.
In 2002, the novice Anna joined Christie’s, starting as a “coffee-fetching” assistant and gradually beginning to handle precious antique jewelry from the 19th to 20th centuries. Subsequently, she worked at Van Cleef & Arpels and Harry Winston, completing her transition from student to professional.
Gradually, the growing creative impulse within her made it impossible to remain content with the status quo. At this time, Anna’s mentor and then chief jewelry designer at Harry Winston, Maurice Galli, told her, “Don’t be a cage bird!”
In 2007, Anna established her eponymous brand in New York. The Lehman Brothers financial crisis that soon followed did not shake her resolve. For over a decade, she immersed herself in creation, diligently studying Eastern and Western cultures and arts, incorporating her classical music background into her work.
She frequently flew back to Paris’s haute joaillerie workshops from around the world, repeatedly combining classic craftsmanship with innovative materials to create works with an Eastern essence and a strong modern sensibility. Dr. Michael S. Krzemnicki, Director of SSEF (Swiss Gemmological Institute), described her works as “delicate, complex, and subtle.”
Anna’s perseverance attracted attention from the French haute couture circle. She later became the first and only Chinese female haute joaillerie artist invited to join the French Haute Couture and Fashion Federation in its 150-year history.
To date, the Haute Couture Federation has only 12 jewelry members, including Chopard, Chaumet, and Boucheron. ANNA HU is the only independent designer brand and the only one founded by a Chinese person.
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In May 2024, one of America’s largest museums, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with nearly 150 years of history, opened its newly renovated jewelry gallery – the “Kaplan Family Foundation Jewelry Gallery.” It showcases 150 pieces of jewelry spanning 4,000 years from ancient Egypt to contemporary times, including Anna’s “Orchid Brooch.”
“This masterpiece of a large brooch continues the pursuit and expression of naturalism in jewelry for thousands of years, but its scale and innovative use of materials open up an unprecedented new vision,” commented Emily Stoehrer, curator of the Kaplan Family Foundation Jewelry Gallery at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Anna has a deep connection with Boston. At 14, she came alone to study cello at Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Boston. Her guardian at the time was Shirley Tam, founder of the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts. Ms. Tam, a lover of calligraphy and Chinese painting, collected original works by masters like Zhang Daqian, Qi Baishi, and Fu Baoshi. During that time, Anna often found herself in the company of these Eastern artistic masterpieces.
Nearly thirty years later, the “Orchid Brooch” was inspired by Zhang Daqian’s 1948 “Orchid” painting. As one of the Four Gentlemen in Chinese art (plum, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum), the orchid has been imbued with deep emotions and symbolic meanings by Chinese literati. Anna used the endangered green Angraceum orchid as a prototype, emulating ink wash techniques to create an orchid that is both elegant and graceful, yet strong and upright.
The piece is crafted from titanium, weighing only 53.5 grams, giving it a light and airy posture. Silver represents the stems, green the leaves, with a structure that is both soft and strong. The orchid petals are spread out with slightly curled edges, and each flower center is set with a natural, unheated red spinel of about 1.5 carats. The buds and blooms show subtle differences from each other.
The unusual colors of the stems, leaves, and flowers are inspired by nature yet pulsate with intense emotion, the result of dozens of studies and discussions between Anna and her workshop.
She selected a vibrant green from over 20 shades of titanium anodized green for the leaves. To achieve the vivid pink-purple of the orchid, craftsmen carefully controlled the oxidation voltage, time, and temperature. Upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that 17 to 18 fine lines have been carefully etched onto the surface of each petal, giving it a lively narrative quality.
This piece also has a hidden Easter egg: Anna incorporated the classic “question mark necklace” design from Western haute joaillerie. The orchid’s shape resembles an inverted question mark, also reminiscent of an Eastern classical fan shape.
It’s hard to imagine where Anna’s inspiration comes from. She says that when creating, music actually echoes in her mind. The “soul music” for this orchid brooch is the “Meditation” from the 1894 opera “Thaïs” by French composer Jules Massenet.
While sketching, she imagined each petal and leaf gently swaying with the breeze and the melody. “It’s like the interplay between the violet D minor and the joyful D major, echoing the ‘Meditation,’ presenting a subtle emotion that’s on the verge of joy but not quite ecstatic, about to be passionate but not yet exuberant,” Anna explains.
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In fact, before the “Orchid Brooch,” Anna’s “China Red Magpie Brooch” was collected and permanently exhibited by the State Historical Museum of Russia in May 2018. Anna became the first Asian contemporary jewelry artist to collaborate with the State Historical Museum of Russia.
To celebrate this collection, Anna exhibited 20 pieces on-site, showcasing the beauty of the fusion between Eastern culture and Western craftsmanship. Among them was a large jewelry piece, the “Monet Water Lilies” necklace, which used over two thousand colorful gemstones to depict Monet’s impression of a water lily pond.
Anna once recalled the creative process for the “Monet Water Lilies,” which began with a slightly tipsy moment. She locked herself in a room with only a large table and thousands of colorful gemstones, carefully examining each one. Then, “like a composer creating a piece of music,” each gemstone became a musical note, and she immersed herself in endless creation for the next few days.
This kind of passionate creativity, on such a grand and complex scale, is impossible to replicate, even for the artist herself. It was a moment of inspirational explosion, a somewhat frenzied creative journey.
From obtaining her GIA certificate in 1997 to creating such a magnificent piece in 2007, Anna had accumulated 10 years of experience. Years later, when she admired this piece again, tears unconsciously rolled down her cheeks.
She said that variations and sonatas are like rings and earrings, but she had always wanted to create an epic piece like a Beethoven symphony. A symphony has tens of thousands of notes, and in jewelry, it requires a large number of different types, carats, colors, and shapes of gemstones to display grandeur and rich colors.
The star of that exhibition, the “China Red Magpie Brooch,” was inspired by the Qing Dynasty artist Giuseppe Castiglione’s work “Auspicious Cranes.” This 18th-century Italian missionary who came to the Chinese court interpreted the essence of Chinese birds and flowers using Western techniques.
Anna captured its essence, crafting the outline in 18K white gold and setting over 500 gemstones to create the pair of magpies and forest flowers and fruits. She used white diamonds, yellow diamonds, rubies, and sapphires of different colors and cuts to create a colorful palette, finally adding a precious South Sea pearl as the finishing touch. The work combines the splendor of Eastern royalty with Western delicacy and vividness.
Beyond the top museums in Russia and the United States, Anna has another piece that has found its home in Europe’s largest decorative arts museum. In June 2022, the “Tai Chi Serpent Bangle” was donated by its collector, contemporary photography master Cindy Sherman, becoming a permanent collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Louvre’s west wing in Paris.
Cindy Sherman is a legendary figure in photography. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired all the photographs from her “Untitled Film Stills” series for $1 million in 1995.
The photography master fell in love with Anna’s jewelry at a charity dinner and won the opportunity to have Anna custom-design a piece for her. After repeated discussions between the two snake-sign artists, they decided to use the “snake” as the creative concept.
The piece features two snakes intertwined around the wrist and fingers, serving as both a ring and a bracelet, intricately complex. Anna created the central Tai Chi symbol using mother-of-pearl and black onyx, with gold and silver snakes biting each other, expressing the harmony of yin and yang and the middle way, showcasing the understated and moderate beauty of Eastern culture, with additional symbolism of two dragons playing with a pearl and the cycle of life.
After multiple invitations from the director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Cindy Sherman finally parted with this beloved piece that she “could sleep wearing” in 2022. This jewelry, inspired by traditional Confucian and Taoist culture, is now collected in one of Europe’s top museums, witnessing the journey of contemporary jewelry.
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In 2012, Anna held her first global solo exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Louvre. She is a regular at art fairs such as the Paris Biennale, TEFAF, and PAD, standing out as a unique Chinese face in the Western high jewelry circle. She is both an artist and a scholar who never stops learning and improving. Her works blend Eastern and Western influences, with a strong style influenced by her classical music background.
Pianist Fou Ts’ong once said that Beethoven is like Du Fu, Schubert like Tao Yuanming, and Mozart like Li Bai. Anna deeply resonates with this. In music, she admires Beethoven, respecting his lifelong ambition to compose 10 symphonies, which ended with the 9th due to health issues, but this imperfection does not diminish his greatness.
Creating jewelry symphonies was Anna’s original intention and passion. When establishing her brand, Anna vowed to create 10 “jewelry symphonies” and complete 999 pieces in her lifetime. This mirrors the spirit of her jewelry art mentor, the 95-year-old Mrs. Moussaieff, a descendant of a renowned jewelry family, who has maintained her passion throughout her life, completely forgetting about age.
Over the years, in conversations with museum curators, Anna has often been asked, “Why do your works look so much like antiques?” Reflecting on her pieces inspired by Dunhuang flying apsaras and Emperor Huizong of Song’s paintings, she feels deeply moved.
She believes that these works, rooted in traditional Chinese culture and art, possess an intangible aura and a mysterious charm. They instantly evoke associations and resonance in these curators with sharp eyes who have seen the world’s most exquisite artworks.
This is precisely what Anna aspires to achieve. Her cultural background, life experiences, education, and artistic insights have shaped her into a unique individual.
Just like Classicism and Impressionism, Anna’s ambition as an artist is to establish an art school. With a strong academic quality like herself, it is based on five thousand years of Chinese culture while skillfully applying European jewelry craftsmanship, aiming to secure its own place in the long river of jewelry history spanning tens of thousands of years.
In 2024, Anna revealed that she has actually received invitations from more international museums. In the near future, more of her works will be collected by top museums and exhibited to the public. However, what Anna personally enjoys most is still immersing herself behind the scenes, dedicating every minute and second to creation.
Anna Hu: The Haute Joaillerie Artist Conquering the World’s Top Museums
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