Titanium and butterflies: How the Chinese jeweler-wizard Wallace Chan creates his masterpieces

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Wallace Chan is the only jeweler in the world whose work cannot be counterfeited. Shimmering butterflies, wriggling dragons, fish and dragonflies, as if frozen in precious "armor" … He has several innovative technologies, created by him jewelry now belong to members of European royal families. It all started in a poor neighborhood in Hong Kong - with plastic flowers and a porcelain spoon.

Wallace Chan was born in 1956 into a poor Chinese family. He was five when his family moved to Hong Kong and faced a language barrier. Wallace learned Cantonese only at the age of nine and was able to go to school, but he studied there for three years, because from childhood he was forced to work for a piece of bread. Almost literally: he collected plastic flowers from ready-made parts. For three bags of such "masterpieces" he received so much that he could buy two whole sweet rolls. Perhaps it was the skills acquired in those difficult years - perseverance and patience, excellent fine motor skills and a philosophical view of the world, the ability to create something beautiful literally "out of nothing" - that became defining in Wallace's entire creative destiny.

The environment in which Wallace grew up was conservative - they honored traditions and tried to preserve ancient crafts. So the thirteen-year-old Wallace Chan ended up in a carving workshop, where he mastered carving on bone and stone. At the age of sixteen, Chan became an apprentice to a Buddhist sculptor, and in the 90s made several large figures for Buddhist monasteries. In this matter, he became a real ace, became famous not only in China, but also in other Asian countries - and after that his name became known in Europe.

Surprisingly, in the same years when Chan created a golden mortar for the Buddha's tooth and experimented with cutting, he lived … on the roof of a building in Macau. Each of his work, albeit expensive, required a huge amount of time, effort and expense - and the fee only compensated for the waste of resources.

At the turn of the millennium, Wallace suddenly stopped all creative activity. He meditated, engaged in self-knowledge, reflected on life and his place in the world. Studying Buddhist symbolism, he suddenly realized what he should do. When Wallace Chan made his first piece of jewelry (his parents were the sponsors of the creation), he began to bypass all jewelry stores in the area, but the staff chased this strange man away. Perhaps they are now biting their elbows, realizing that they could glorify their enterprise - but in those years, Chan seemed just a city crazy. Once the owner of one of the shops came out to the noise, carefully considered what Chan was offering, and gave him the phone number of his friend, who was selling all sorts of extravagant gizmos. Thus began Wallace Chen's path to the heights of fame.

In the 2000s, Wallace Chan began practicing as a jeweler - and made some real mini-revolutions in jewelery. He has developed several innovative technologies that make it possible to most accurately bring to life those obscure images that are born in the mind liberated by meditation.

New ways of carving products that create luminous surfaces; detection of methods of coloring titanium in different colors by chemical reactions, not sputtering; huge brooches, completely weightless; invisible bartacks; incrustation of one stone with another …

He invented the Wallace Cut, an intricate three-dimensional stone carving.

It was Wallace Chan who introduced gold-veined titanium jewelry into jewelry fashion. He believes that titanium is the most useful metal for humans, it has a positive effect on health and state of mind.

In 2018, he presented a collection using ultra-durable jewelry porcelain - like a true Chinese master, he keeps the recipe for porcelain in secret, but admits that he invented his own kiln, capable of heating up to incredibly high temperatures. He was inspired to work with porcelain from a childhood memory - his brother once showed him a spoon that allegedly belonged to the imperial family in the distant past. Then the spoon, of course, was sold - but it remained in Wallace's memory as something miraculous.

In his fantastic works, the master seeks to capture the process of change, transformation, transformation. He creates dragons, swans, fish, dragonflies and plants from titanium, gold, precious and semi-precious stones. Each work is imbued with complex symbolism, whose roots are in Buddhist culture, ancient Chinese legends and the author's own worldview. “Nature gives, I think,” he answers the question about inspiration. But the master especially loves butterflies. A real dead butterfly is dressed in a luxurious jewelry shell. For Chan, these jewelry is a meditation on the soul, love and death.

Wallace Chan loves to talk in interviews about the creative process, his discoveries, experiments and philosophy, but prefers not to talk about his personal life. He eagerly talks about how many years ago he tried to tame the sound waves from a drill, breaking a glass ball in one of his Buddhist works, but only casually mentions that he was once married and that he has a son - already an adult. And there is still no home, despite the cost of the creations.

Wallace Chan is perhaps the only jeweler-artist whose work is not forged. No one else is simply able to repeat them technically - despite the fact that the jeweler is not afraid to share the stories of creating his jewelry, reads lectures and dreams of revealing a couple of his secrets to mankind using virtual reality technologies.

Wallace's works are in the collections of wealthy Chinese and Europeans, several were acquired by the Danish royal family. They rarely appear at auctions - after all, having seen them once, it is impossible to forget them, and having taken possession of them, it is impossible to part. And for the jeweler himself, parting with another creation is a painful process, and, judging by his words, Wallace always sets himself up for the fact that he will have to tear his beautiful child from his heart.

There is never too much beauty. And in continuation of the theme, a story about how ivory masterpieces were created: puzzle balls, openwork ships and other delights of Chinese masters.