LAST CHANCE Gold and Treasures: 3,000 Years of Chinese Ornaments

L’ÉCOLE Middle East – Van Cleef and Arpels’ school of jewellery arts– is celebrating its opening in Dubai Design District with this spectacular exhibition. The clue is of course in the name: the pieces on show (a hundred or so of them) come from the Mengdiexuan Collection, a genuinely outstanding private art collection from Hong Kong, and spans more than three thousand years of goldsmithing work from China.

That in itself is interesting, for China is better known as a culture that valued bronze, porcelain and jade rather than gold for high-status artefacts. The Mengdiexuan collection has been assembled by Betty Lo and Kenneth Chu, partners in business and in life; the Mengdiexuan collection began with a wedding gift from Lo’s father, a decorating mirror, which fired their interest in Chinese metalworking. According to Chu, they were attracted by the creativity on show in gold objects, combined with the fact that gold was used in Chinese culture primarily as smaller objects and personal ornaments which were eminently collectable.

The more familiar genres of bronze, jade and porcelain are considered among China’s noblest fine arts; when they started, Betty Lo and Kenneth Chu were taking a step into the unknown. In 30 years of building their collection, however, they have become both experts and advocates for Chinese gold.

One clear result was the appreciation that China was open to influences from outside its geographic centre, indeed from outside of China altogether. The collection sheds light on the true diversity of Chinese civilisation.

The exhibition runs through many of the key techniques and developments of Chinese goldworking. The oldest pieces employ hammering and chasing techniques, relatively simple in the earliest work but which by the Tang Dynasty (618–907) had developed into complex ornaments of great delicacy. By that time gold had come to represent divine splendour (the Buddhist paradise was seen as golden) and intellectual virtue (because gold was mined, it was seen as analogous to human qualities – so the Tang emperor Tai Zong could praise his chief minister for being able to discern and refine the ‘gold’ in men).

A second craft process featured in the exhibition, casting, was derived from bronze metallurgy and in particular has produced magnificent ritual vessels from the Shang to Han eras (roughly contemporary with ancient Rome). Another technique seen in the collection is granulation, a process of making gold granules that are used as decoration together with inlays of other materials – gems, glass, shell inlays. Though lost until the 20th century, the technique was available to Chinese artisans as early as the Western Han period, and was fashionable from then well into Tang.

And Chinese goldsmithing probably reached its zenith with gold wire and filigree, techniques that in the hands of the masters could capture life and movement.

The exhibition is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 7pm.