Cindy Chao The Art Jewel’s new Amour Butterfly pays tribute to enduring love
- The artist created the high jewellery brooch for a couple who are collectors and admirers of Cindy Chao’s works
- The Amour Butterfly represents Chao’s metamorphosis as an artist, and is brought to life with emeralds and diamonds
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Cindy Chao, the celebrated high jewellery artist, unveils her 10th Annual Butterfly brooch – the only one of its kind – which was created for a couple who collect high jewellery art, and are long-standing clients of the artist.
Richly symbolic in design and execution, the unique Black Label Masterpiece features a butterfly with three-dimensional, fully stretched and layered wings resembling two tightly overlapping butterflies that are merged into one. The piece implies a deeply affectionate couple taking flight together.
The butterfly is considered an emblem of eternal love and marital bliss, and two butterflies seen together signal a long-lasting commitment in Chinese culture. The Amour Butterfly also expresses Chao’s love and blessings to the couple – and symbolically, to other collectors and couples with enduring relationships.
What sets the Amour Butterfly apart from other Masterpieces in the artist’s iconic Annual Butterfly collection, which launched in 2008, is the use of emeralds and unusual materials in an innovative breakthrough. This feat represents Chao’s ongoing metamorphosis as an artist, and the honing of her atelier’s techniques and craftsmanship.
Rare emeralds in the spotlight
While precious rubies, sapphires and rough diamonds of every hue have adorned Chao’s other nine jewelled butterflies, she brings the Amour Butterfly to life with emeralds for the first time. One of her favourite precious gemstones used to demonstrate the colour of nature, the emerald also represents deep, mature love and an eternal relationship, echoing the love and intimacy shared by its owners.
Enlivening the sculpted hind wings is a pair of extremely rare and almost identical sugarloaf cabochon Colombian emeralds, weighing 29.18 and 27.52 carats respectively. Similar in weight, size, origin and colour grading, they make a perfect statement of long-lasting love.
Scintillating diamonds add rhythm and vitality
Scintillating on the body of the Amour Butterfly is an elongated, 8.31-carat, marquise-cut diamond endowed with an extraordinary aspect ratio and good symmetry. Displaying exceptional optical transparency due to its high clarity with an Internally Flawless, Type IIa classification, the pure carbon diamond is doubly alluring, nestled inside an innovative new setting constructed from polished, clear ox horn.
Ox horn was used for the first time in the Caribbean Summer brooch, and the Cindy Chao atelier has proven its mastery of organic materials by perfecting the skill of meticulously heating it with precise temperature control to produce the desired shape. This breakthrough in craftsmanship makes its debut in the Annual Butterfly creation, with the ox horn’s light-transmitting natural texture capturing the beauty of the butterfly body and alluding to the vitality of life.
Radiating light on the wings and creating a stunning visual effect of a butterfly in full flight is an array of white diamonds, with large-carat, cushion-cut stones interspersed with smaller round pieces. Not only do they add a brilliant lustre to the brooch, but they also bestow the light of life.
Three years in the making, the Amour Butterfly is the culmination of Chao’s dedication to her artistry that imbues each art jewel with a unique humanistic and artistic value.
The Annual Butterfly collection is one of the most symbolic representations of Chao’s core values as an artist. Each annual reincarnation of the butterfly reflects her own aspirations and transformations as an artist. Her dedication to her craft and breakthroughs in craftsmanship culminate in the essential spirit of the maison’s ability to continue to metamorphose.
In 2010, Chao’s Royal Butterfly was inducted into the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in the United States, while the Ruby Butterfly is part of the permanent collection at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In 2012, her Transcendence Butterfly sold at a Christie’s Geneva auction for almost US$1 million, and two years later, the Ballerina Butterfly – co-created with fashionista and actress Sarah Jessica Parker – raised US$1.2 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for the New York City Ballet.