Cindy Chao: The Evolution from Artistic Jewelry to Stylistic Mastery

Living in the hustle and bustle of daily life, have you ever paused to carefully observe the posture of a single leaf?

Have you ever been deeply moved by a flower, a butterfly, or a cluster of coral?

Each of us is a potential artist, viewing the world through our unique perspectives. However, artists not only observe the world through their own lens but also showcase their vision through their creations.

Throughout history, there has been an abundance of artworks, but jewelry art pieces have always held a special place among them.

The significance of jewelry artworks lies not merely in flaunting rarity and expense through precious materials and exquisite craftsmanship. Instead, it stems from creating meaning through art itself – using art to dialogue with nature and humanity, exploring the philosophy and profound meanings hidden within, discussing the macro and micro relationships between humans and nature, and thereby adding more possibilities and inspiration to the world.

When a piece of jewelry artwork can present such qualities, it undoubtedly indicates that the artist behind it has reached maturity in both skill and thought, establishing a distinctive style. Today, we’re going to talk about one such artist and her brand – Cindy Chao.

Jewelry enthusiasts are sure to know Cindy Chao, not just because her works have been collected by the world’s three most prestigious museums and continuously set new hammer price records at global benchmark auctions. More importantly, she has shown the world the capability of Chinese jewelry artists and even led the development of contemporary jewelry art aesthetic styles.

Today, jewelry artist Cindy Chao has traversed a 20-year artistic journey with unwavering artistic ideals, and her brand has reached the significant milestone of its 20th anniversary. As we once again behold her 20th-anniversary series of new works, we see not only the essence of Cindy Chao’s craftsmanship over the past 20 years and a tribute to the brand’s classic aesthetic style but also her increasingly masterful artistic control in her creations.

In creating the 20th-anniversary series, Cindy Chao chose the Four Seasons series, which holds extraordinary meaning for her, as the core of her creation. Inspired by leaves, she spent three seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter personally observing and experiencing hundreds of different leaf forms in different seasons.

She sought to find the individual forms with the most vital life force among them, using her unique creativity and expressiveness to achieve the artistic height of interpreting the transition of four seasons through the form of a single leaf.

The spring leaf exhibits a vibrant vitality, transforming from curled to spread out, telling people that winter has just passed and spring has quietly arrived. As spring turns to summer, the leaves become more spread out, with the edges showing just the right thickness and undulating folds to present the lushness of leaves full of water.

In late summer and early autumn, the artist captures the image of sunlight shining on leaves from a unique observational perspective, using yellow and white diamonds to create the bright moment of light illuminating all things. Although the leaves of late autumn are withered and shrunken, their core structure still stands proud.

Even winter leaves that have weathered frost and snow show an upright posture growing towards the sun. The work transcends the tangible objects themselves, using light, shadow, and color to create an overall atmosphere, showcasing the transition of the four seasons as if leading everyone into real nature.

Cindy Chao extracts the essence of leaf lines and structures, starting with wax carving to transform the momentary beauty of the four seasons’ transitions and life’s flow into miniature artworks. Leading 12 European master craftsmen with thirty years of experience to create without regard to cost, they craft large curved folds and fully set gemstones on titanium metal only 1.77mm thin.

Master craftsmen must work under microscopes magnified 20 to 60 times for the setting. In the end, each gemstone-filled long leaf brooch weighs only 22 grams, presenting the agile thinness of a real leaf.

A dragonfly’s wings appear so thin and fragile, but when flying against the wind, its fearless upward and forward posture demonstrates resilience and strength. For Cindy Chao, the dragonfly aligns perfectly with her unwavering persistence and courage over the past 20 years.

In this creation, Cindy Chao once again breaks the boundaries between art and disciplines, using a combination of virtual and real creative techniques to inject her signature root and vein concept into the dragonfly brooch.

Through meticulous observation and control of three-dimensional structure, she recreates the force lines and muscle directions of a dragonfly’s wings during vigorous flight by using root and vein lines that spiral and extend in three-dimensional space. This gives people a more intuitive sense of the vitality of life.

Each dragonfly brooch in the 20th-anniversary series has unique wings. The artist, through her meticulous observation of nature, showcases the myriad possibilities of the natural world. The dragonfly’s wings shimmer with colorful light under the refraction of sunlight.

Through titanium metal anodizing, a velvety, fantastical color is presented. Relying on continuously improved setting techniques, she creates a gossamer-thin transparency that mimics sunlight indirectly falling on the dragonfly’s transparent wings through gaps in the leaves.

As we marvel at how vividly Cindy Chao observes and expresses the vitality of natural life, we can’t help but raise new questions: Where does the thinking of an artist who can create such masterpieces come from? Where does her skill come from? Where does her artistic conception come from? Where does her style come from?

All seemingly “inspired” genius art is backed by thousands or even tens of thousands of hours of accumulation. Art requires sufficient knowledge and effort to support it. Since 2004, Cindy Chao has been creating art with jewelry as her medium.

For 20 years, she has consistently embraced creative concepts that transcend time. With her ingenious creativity and unique craftsmanship, she has elevated jewelry creation thinking, broken artistic boundaries, integrated Eastern and Western aesthetic elements, continuously expanded boundaries and initiated new ideas, forming her unique artistic style.

Cindy’s artistic enlightenment comes from her deep family heritage. From childhood, she was nurtured by her architect grandfather to develop three-dimensional thinking. She was trained to construct imagination using 3D, 360° architectural thinking, to think in terms of three-dimensional shaping, gradually condensing into a form of three-dimensional thinking.

When Cindy first began to engage with sculpture, her sculptor father demanded of her: “Creating a flower is not just about making a flower. You need to capture the eternity and vitality that life presents at this moment. You must put the life of the flower into it.”

Since its inception, CINDY CHAO The Art Jewel has differed significantly from other brands in that the creation of its pieces always begins with wax sculptures personally crafted by Cindy. The combination of “architect’s thinking” and “sculptor’s craftsmanship” has become Cindy’s DNA. Over 20 years, the three core creative essences of “architectural sense, sculptural quality, and vitality” have remained unchanged.

From the brand’s establishment, Cindy Chao has spared no effort in exploration and experimentation, breaking the tradition of jewelry making that begins with 2D drawings. She starts her creations with 3D wax sculptures, continuously upgrading the three-dimensional aspect of jewelry.

In the early days of her career, the artist’s solitary and cold mood was reflected in the black and white tones of her works. In 2007, when she sent her “Winter Black and White Branch Necklace and Bracelet” to Christie’s New York auction, both pieces were collected at nearly triple their estimated prices, setting a record for the highest multiple at the event.

This success established her brand’s new position in the global landmark jewelry art collection market.

By the 2016 Paris Biennale des Antiquaires, Cindy Chao again took the four seasons as her theme, creating the Black Label Masterpiece “Winter Leaves Necklace,” symbolizing rebirth and new opportunities.

This time, the winter leaves were threaded with a golden line, showcasing Cindy Chao’s more dazzling and passionate creative mood, stunning the world with her forward-looking exquisite craftsmanship and outstanding artistic value.

During this period, material limitations were broken. Even the hardest titanium metal could be used to create the softest lines.

Cindy boldly employed innovative materials such as sandalwood, ox horn, and raw gemstones. She mobilized global resources regardless of time and cost to find gemstones, just to satisfy her artistic vision. To achieve the highest artistic pursuit, she repeatedly overthrew and reshaped her work, willing to spend thousands of hours continuously challenging the limits of craftsmanship.

As time progressed, Cindy Chao’s creations took on more new looks. The “Spring Cardamom Brooch” of 2022 was her first attempt to challenge sculptural sense through color theory.

Drawing on the principle of color layering in oil paintings, she created a new three-dimensional color aesthetic. Through multi-layered inlay combinations, she sculpted the effect of three-dimensional light and shadow and a multi-faceted 3D wrap-around structure.

This truly achieved the new 3D-3 concept of creating three-dimensional undulations through color, cutting, setting, and light and shadow together, leading the future creation of the Masterpiece series.

In 2023, the “Pamir Brooch” incorporated the concept of “root veins” into the work. Robust and powerful veins are hidden within the multi-layered structure. The artist’s increasingly mature aesthetic foundation, relaxed and free state of mind, and masterful craftsmanship skills are transformed into creative strokes that naturally move between the virtual and the real.

From the initial stark black and white to the current ease and flexibility, supported by masterful craftsmanship skills, Cindy Chao now moves freely between the physical and the conceptual, the abstract and the concrete.

Over 20 years, Cindy Chao has continuously and vividly exported her artistic influence to top art institutions, while her unique forward-looking perspective demonstrates future value, making her works deeply loved by art jewelry collectors both at home and abroad.

Art becomes art because it can break the constraints of time and space, allowing mature artists to gradually converge and sublimate their philosophy and emotions into a new style. Over 20 years, from breaking the boundaries between jewelry and art, challenging the heights of craftsmanship and aesthetics, breaking down cultural barriers between East and West, to integrating diverse art forms, pushing boundaries has been Cindy Chao’s unwavering persistence.

Constantly reinventing herself, her artistic aesthetic style has gradually been shaped through repeated “uncompromising” breakthroughs and “whole-hearted” creations, finally becoming her signature style.

In 2021, Cindy Chao, hailing from Asia, received the highest recognition from the French government in Paris, the birthplace of haute joaillerie. She was awarded the “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” by the French Minister of Culture, in recognition of her talent and achievements in the field of art jewelry creation, as well as her contributions to the inheritance and innovation of jewelry craftsmanship. She became the first Chinese jewelry artist to receive this honor.

International art critics have praised her as a master who has opened a new page in jewelry art, saying “After Art Nouveau and Contemporary Art, Cindy Chao has ushered in a new era of Nouveau Art Nouveau.” The world’s top haute joaillerie institution, La Haute Ecole de Joaillerie in Paris, has invited jewelry artist Cindy Chao to serve as a guest instructor starting from September 2023. This is the first time in the school’s nearly 160-year history that an Asian artist has been invited to serve as a guest instructor.

CINDY CHAO, as the only Chinese art jewelry brand with works collected by the world’s three authoritative museums, has established its brand status as “museum-collected art jewelry.” On the occasion of CINDY CHAO The Art Jewel’s 20th anniversary, the “20th Anniversary Series Works Touring Exhibition Beijing Station” has officially opened at Beijing China World Mall in the form of a “mobile museum” for the first time.

The brand has selected multiple highly representative new works from the 20th-anniversary series for their global debut, leading the public to explore the accumulation of 20 years of creative journey and the current free artistic expression.

The exhibition space is themed “Tree of Life,” highlighting the brand’s consistent artistic persistence. It unveils the mystery of museum-collected jewelry to the public, leading viewers into the artist’s creative world and providing an immersive experience of the charm of art jewelry.

Go and see it in person! While the beauty is still waiting for you there.

Cindy Chao: The Evolution from Artistic Jewelry to Stylistic Mastery

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Further Reading

Cindy Chao: A Naturalist’s Passion in Jeweled Artistry

From Masterpiece to Mentor: What Happens When Jewelry Artist Cindy Chao Steps into the Classroom?