For the past decade, with consistency and artistic integrity, jeweller Cindy Chao has been painstakingly recreating a delicate creature in precious stones and metal, culminating in her 10th Annual Butterfly piece: 2023 Black Label Masterpiece I Amour Butterfly Brooch. 

Her brand, CINDY CHAO The Art Jewel, presents an exhibition like no other this year. “Meld in Light and Shade” at the famed Opera Gallery Hong Kong is part of a global tour that also includes a stint in Shanghai and other Asian stops. For the city, it’s the first of its kind to have a jewelled, precious butterfly exhibition done by a leading female artist—for is there any doubt this jewellery artist’s work is nothing short of wearable, sculptural art?

“Great perseverance and courage are required to create a work of art,” says Chao in the lead-up to the exhibition’s opening night in Hong Kong. “While the human body may perish with time, art can endure forever. Therefore, we use our creations to prove that we once existed.”

Despite having a vast treasury of spectacular jewellery in her repertoire of 19 years, many of which we’ve feature time and again, the annual butterfly brooch seems to fascinate collectors, critics, and curators with equal interest. It has become the most iconic emblem of the Black Label Masterpieces by Cindy Chao. Just as the butterfly embodies a philosophical and literal process of metamorphosis and continuous evolution, over the course of nearly two decades, Chao has seen vast growth and unprecedented changes as an artist and a jeweller. 

The dazzling design in the art piece features two emeralds on the wings and a special-cut elongated marquise diamond (8.31 carats) as the butterfly’s body, held together in carved ox horn and titanium. The formation of the body in unbreakable and precious titanium—five times harder than gold—is deliberate; Chao forged together the dancing posture and the agile fluttering effect with the help of her team of master craftsmen. 

As the literature on the brooch reads, the original butterfly created by Chao and her team spans over 15,000 hours of work over the course of five years. Using time-tested techniques to create a three-dimensional body and unfurled wings, everything is tightly intertwined, “using the hardest metal in the world to form the softest curvatures.” 

For all the hardware and alchemy that occurs to bring this bejewelled butterfly to vivid life, the overarching theme Chao has for this—and indeed all of her collections—is “love.” The idea came into fruition as “it was born out of love and embodies the profound friendship between the artist and the collectors, as well as the love and heritage of two generations of the collector’s family.” To honour that, Chao designed a butterfly with multi-layered wings to represent two butterflies coming together to be united as one.

Since the original creation in 2008, Chao has opened a new chapter with the butterfly motif, using different stones, colours, and design elements, each more remarkable than the other. The butterfly effect, so to speak, has been such that you’ll find two of her pieces in museums, including the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where her work has been inducted into the permanent collection. In 2010, the Royal Butterfly Brooch became a permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, the first contemporary work created by an Asian jewellery artist collected by the museum in its 170-year history. Another two butterflies broke records on auction, at Sotheby’s Hong Kong Magnificent Jewels and Jadeite sale, where Chao’s 2013-2014 Ballerina Butterfly Brooch raised HK$9.47 million (US$1.21 million) for a worthy cause. 

Knowing the significance and rarity of the collection, the anticipation in the region to see Cindy Chao’s latest creation and come fluttering by to Opera Gallery Hong Kong is great, as its sojourn in the city is all-too-brief before it flits away to another destination. 

If you’d like to own part of the limited-edition piece, do take note that there’s waiting list; the annual butterfly brooches have been reserved for the discerning until 2028 by collectors around the world. But, for a first view in the city, join the exhibition this autumn at Opera Gallery Hong Kong. As one of the leading international dealers and representatives of modern and contemporary art, Opera Gallery offers private collectors unique access to a world of creativity through exclusive exhibitions and curated programmes of high-profile artists. 

Cindy Chao joins a grand pantheon of icons who’ve showcased their work there and continue to do so during the exhibition, including Chinese lyrical abstract artists Chu Teh-chun and Feng Xiao-min, whose pieces demonstrate “a fluid interplay between darkness and light, Eastern painting techniques and Chinese calligraphy, personal reflection and universal harmony,” paralleling Chao’s own creative journey. Opera Gallery’s curatorial approach to the exhibition extends even to symbolism, highlighting the concepts of renewal and metamorphosis associated with butterflies, making use of the recurring motif in Spanish artist Manolo Valdés’s art to accentuate the elegance and virtuosity of Chao’s jewellery creations.

“Meld in Light and Shade—CINDY CHAO The Art Jewel 2023 Annual Butterfly Exhibition”
18–28 October 2023
Opera Gallery Hong Kong, 9 Queen’s Road Central, Central, Hong Kong

All images courtesy of CINDY CHAO The Art Jewel