insight
工程技术，地产投资，信仰家园，时尚生活
我抵达罗启妍(Kai-Yin Lo)位于香港半山区(Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels)的寓所时，她本人并未在家。她是知名首饰设计师、文化历史学者、策展人以及狂热藏家，正出席苏富比的春季拍卖会，香港一年到头的艺 术系列活动连轴转，这是其中一站。她给我电话说自己正在往回赶的路上。
她家的菲佣给我开的门，菲佣是香港中产阶层生活的标配。菲佣以及其丈夫与罗启妍一起生活了28年，她本人则一生未嫁。等候罗启妍时，我上了她家的洗 手间，印象最深的是她家卫生间美国人所谓的“power wall”，（无需提它的具体位置），墙上“杂乱无章”地钉贴着很多照片——她与基辛格(Henry Kissinger)、已故英国前首相撒切尔夫人(Margaret Thatcher)、尼克松(Richard Nixon)、皮尔斯•布鲁斯南(Piers Brosnan)等众多大名人的合照。
本人以前曾造访过她的寓所，但本次光临，对这么小的空间里竟然塞得如此满满当当仍颇感惊愕。她的家言语无法形容，多数是五花八门的中国艺术作品、人工制品、收藏品以及物件，它们摆得到处都是，这是她多年来淘宝的结果，其费用基本来自自己首饰销售的收入。
随便一瞥，可能看到一幅当代的兔子泼墨画；朝另一方向瞥视，可能看到两把明代(Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644)木椅或是安东尼•葛姆雷(Antony Gormley)的大作；朝左看，或许是现代中国绘画鼻祖吴冠中(Wu Guanzhong)的素描画《黄山》(“Yellow Mountain”)；朝右瞧，或能看到一幅猴子画作及一些石器制品，它们都已有千年以上历史。
地 板上堆放着书籍及拍卖目录；桌面上则摆着亚宝石以及几件象牙雕刻品；橱柜里摆放的是宋代(Song Dynasty, 960-1279)白瓷。似乎每一寸墙面都得以充分利用。在外人看来，这似乎显得过分拥密，与其说是温馨的家居空间，倒不如说更象个古玩店。但主人如此设 计及摆放，表明她自己对此颇为心安理得。
此时罗启妍刚刚进屋，就说自己一直崇尚混搭式的审美观。“自己刚入道时，就追求率意的平衡感，”她这样提及自己上世纪70年代的早期设计生涯。“从 一开始，我就觉得非对称的美感，这是一种自我解脱，也是一种设计风格。”我注意到她本人就穿着一双怪异的乐福鞋——一只红色、一只则为白色。“这并非做 作，”她说。“本人近几年一直如此。”
罗启妍的祖父于19世纪80年代从广东移居香港。在她眼里，祖父就是所谓的“乡绅”，在皇仁书院(Queen’s College)学会英语后，就加入某商行，后来又成了一名买办——替欧洲人打点公司的中方经理。
“我们是香港所谓的老式家庭，”她说。祖父在太平山(Peak)下的坚尼地道(Kennedy Road)盖了自己的房子，大英帝国统治时期，这个地段不允许华人居住。“即华人与狗不得入内，”她说。她在坚尼地道长大及上学，此地距离她过去10年居 住的花园道(Garden Road)并不远。
她目前居住的公寓值好几百万英镑，按照香港拥挤的居住标准，此屋可谓超大户型。当她说到实际面积时，我稍有些听差。“哇，3400平方英尺，”我说。“不，是3500平方英尺，”她纠正我。在香港，寸土寸金并非虚言。
她从小到大都说粤语，但被送至英格兰南部的苏塞克斯圣子修道院(Convent of Holy Child Jesus in Sussex)学习英语。“牛津与剑桥我都曾去过，”她说。“但我自己选择上剑桥，因为剑桥的校园更漂亮。”在剑桥，她学的是欧洲中世纪史，她说这个专业 影响了自己看待物体的方式，所以自己总努力把它们置于历史的纵深坐标里。
上世纪70年代回到香港后，罗启妍才开始进一步了解中国历 史，主要是通过自己从猫街(Cat Street)市场淘来的东西——翡翠饰品、亚宝石以及小刻件。当时的中国大陆基本处于封闭状态，所以百姓对这些东西的渊薮知之甚少。有一次，她曾以极便 宜的价格一下子买过20件玉件，随后多数都作为圣诞礼物送了人，后来才意识到这些物件每件都可能高达1.5万至2万美元。
罗启妍开始把目光转向首饰，并用中国各个朝代的宝石与小刻件相搭配。“听起来似乎非常冠冕堂皇，但本人的确是首饰设计的先行者，因为那时候，首饰不是用珍贵宝石（用黄金或白金镶嵌钻石）打造而成、就是仿制的服装首饰，非此即彼。”
她事业的转折点始于上世纪80年代，当时她在纽约《时代周刊》(Time)上班，有次偶尔造访第五大道(Fifth Avenue)的卡地亚(Cartier)门店，没想到门店经理买下了她设计的一些首饰（包括她当时佩戴的那件首饰），于是她开始为奈曼•马库斯 (Neiman Marcus)、萨克斯第五大道百货(Saks Fifth Avenue)、波道夫•古德曼(Bergdorf Goodman)、哈罗德(Harrods)以及日本三越百货(Mitsukoshi)设计首饰。如今的她主要通过艺术展及网络销售自己设计的首饰，并拥 有了一批稳定的客户拥趸，其中包括希拉里•克林顿(Hillary Clinton)这样的名流。罗启妍一副珍珠与玉的耳环起步价约为400美元。
为了展示自己的技法，她给我展示了一串项链，挂件用巧夺天工的圆环（由2500年前战国时期(Warring States period)一块无色水晶雕琢而成）与年代相对较近的11至18世纪紫水晶、玻璃以及琥珀打磨的古珠相搭配。
成 为知名首饰设计师后，她开始不断拓展自己，进一步了解中国家具及建筑之精髓。上世纪90年代中叶，她多次造访安徽省(Anhui province)，对当地17世纪精雕细刻的木质房屋痴迷不已，有些木质刻板至今仍张挂在她的香港寓所里。她为此还专门出了一本书，详实记录这些美仑美 奂的古建筑，但可惜的是，很多建筑在随后的开发狂潮中遭到破坏。
罗启妍还是一位狂热的艺术藏家，或许最出名的莫过于她资助大画家吴冠中，吴冠中深受法国印象派艺术影响，早期创作的很多作品在文革 (Cultural Revolution)中被付之一炬，原因就是避免遭受迫害。1992年，罗启妍资助吴冠中在大英博物馆(British Museum)举办个人画展，这对于现世画家来说实属凤毛麟角。吴冠中的声名得以奠定，现代中国艺术也越来越被西方社会所熟悉。吴冠中65厘米×140厘 米见方的画作（罗启妍本人收藏了几幅），当时的标价就达到了2万至4万美元，如今它们的售价飚升至90万美元-300万美元之间。
与罗启妍有合作关系的画家还有版画艺术家徐冰(Xu Bing)，1989年天安门(Tiananmen Square)事件后，徐冰离开中国，但随后又回到中国，他的其中一件巨幅作品如今就挂在罗启妍家的墙上，这幅作品全部由徐冰自创的中国汉字组成。
罗仍四处游历，介绍中国艺术与设计，并努力推介她所谓香港“亚洲创意中心”的地位。不久，香港将举办众多艺术活动，其中就有佳士得 (Christie’s)夏季拍卖会，这是香港巴塞尔艺术博览会(Art Basel Hong Kong)以及香港国际艺术展(Hong Kong International Art Fair)的前哨战。
“香港是面向全球的城市，所以香港人见多识广，”罗启妍说，“大家老说：‘香港人一心钻在钱眼里。’但那是个大好事，这正是我们取得不竭力量的源泉。”
戴维•皮林是《金融时报》亚洲版主编
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罗启妍的镇家之宝
罗 启妍作品的永恒主题是“结”，这是佛教八大符号之一。因为结永不终结，所以它寓意永恒。她最喜欢的有些物件就是自己设计的结，它们用象牙、骨头以及木头打 造而成。在中国印度、泰国、斯里兰卡以及印度尼西亚，她看到这种结随处可见，佛教对这几个国家的影响深远。她把这一切归因于丝绸之路(Silk Road0的影响，这条贸易通道把古代中国与中东联结起来。她也特别喜欢灵芝(lingzhi)，这种“神奇蘑菇”用在传统中药中。罗启妍把灵芝作为装饰 物，一株大灵芝独自矗立，另一株小灵芝则与自己从三峡地区(Three Gorges)某河流中淘来的白玉与奇石一起，作为桌子造型的一部分。“我把它们当作花朵使用，”她说。这个造型摆放在她的长圆餐桌上，尤为显眼大气。餐 桌是19世纪的古董，台面镶嵌着宝石与象牙。
译者/常和
May 3, 2013 6:50 pm
At home: Kai-Yin Lo
The jewellery designer’s Hong Kong apartment is home to a vast assortment of Chinese artefacts
©Berton ChangKai-Yin Lo at home in Hong Kong; in the background are artist Xu Bing’s quotations from Chairman Mao
When I arrive at Kai-Yin Lo’s apartment in Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels, the lady herself is not yet in attendance. A prominent jewellery designer, cultural historian, curator and compulsive collector, Lo is at the Sotheby’s spring auction, one of a series of events in the city’s busy art calendar. She calls me to say she is on her way.
The door is opened by her Filipina maid, a fixture of middle-class Hong Kong living. The maid and her husband have lived with Lo, who has never married, for 28 years. I use the bathroom while I’m waiting and am struck by the density – not to mention the location – of what Americans would call her “power wall”. There are countless photographs pinned in higgledy-piggledy fashion of Lo with Henry Kissinger, Lo with the late Margaret Thatcher, Lo with Richard Nixon, Lo with Piers Brosnan and many other luminaries.
I’ve been to the apartment before, but am taken aback once more by just how much is crammed into this space. Her home is choc-a-bloc with a mind-boggling assortment of mostly Chinese art, artefacts, collectables and objects that she has picked up over the years, financed for the most part by her jewellery sales.
A glance this way might reveal a contemporary ink-brush painting of a rabbit; a peek in the other direction, a pair of wooden Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) chairs or a drawing by Antony Gormley. Look to the left and there’s a sketch of the “Yellow Mountain” by Wu Guanzhong, considered a founder of modern Chinese painting; to the right, a picture of a monkey and some stone artefacts, not one of which is less than a thousand years old.
On the floor there are heaps of books and auction catalogues; on the tabletops, semi-precious stones and pieces of carved ivory; and in the cabinets, white ceramics from the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Seemingly every inch of wall space is occupied. In any one else’s hands, this might be all too much, more curio shop than comfortable living space. But Lo’s sense of design and arrangement means that she just about gets away with it.
Lo, who has just arrived, tells me her aesthetic sensibility has always been to mix and match. “I began to balance without balancing,” she says of her early days as a designer in the 1970s. “From the beginning, I thought that asymmetry was good. It’s a way of freeing yourself, and also a device.” I notice that she is wearing an odd pair of loafers, one red and one white. “It’s not affectation,” she says. “I can’t remember within my recent conscious state ever doing otherwise.”
Lo’s grandfather came to Hong Kong in the 1880s from Guangdong province. He had been what she calls a “village squire” and, after learning English at Queen’s College, he joined a merchant bank and later became a comprador, a Chinese manager of a European business.
“We were among the so-called older families of Hong Kong,” she says. He built a house on Kennedy Road, just below the Peak, an area in which the Chinese were not permitted to live under British colonial rule. “That’s right, dogs and Chinese were not allowed,” she says. She grew up and went to school on Kennedy Road, not far from where she has lived for the past 10 years on Garden Road.
©Berton ChangArt on Kai-Yin Lo’s walls includes work by Antony Gormley and Cy Twombly
Her current apartment, which must be worth several million pounds, is enormous by the city’s cramped standards. I slightly mishear when she tells me the size. “Wow, 3,400 sq ft,” I say. “3,500,” she corrects me. In Hong Kong, every square foot counts.
She was brought up speaking Cantonese, but sent to the Convent of Holy Child Jesus in Sussex, southern England, to polish her English. “I got into both Oxford and Cambridge,” she says, “but I chose Cambridge because it’s prettier.” There she studied European medieval history, a discipline, she says, that has influenced the way she looks at objects and seeks to place them in context.
It was only on her return to Hong Kong in the 1970s that she began to learn more about Chinese history, principally through the pieces she bought from Cat Street market: jade ornaments, semi-precious stones and little carvings. In those days, when China was more or less closed, people didn’t know much about such items. She once bought 20 pieces of jade for next to nothing and gave most of them away as Christmas presents. It was only later that she realised they could have been worth $15,000 or $20,000 apiece.
©Berton ChangJapanese and Chinese objects from the 18th and 19th centuries and a third-century Gandara figure
Lo began turning her finds into jewellery, matching stones and little carvings from disparate periods of Chinese history. “I may sound very grand, but I really was a pioneer in jewellery design because in those days jewellery was either made of precious stones – diamonds set with gold or platinum – or it was fake costume jewellery. There was virtually nothing in between.”
Her breakthrough came in the 1980s when she was working in New York for Time magazine and stopped by a Cartier shop on Fifth Avenue. The manager bought some of her pieces (including the one she was wearing) and that led to her designing for Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Harrods and Mitsukoshi in Japan. These days, she sells mostly through art fairs or the internet, and has a stable of loyal clients, including the likes of Hillary Clinton. Her pieces start at around $400 for a pair of pearl and jade earrings.
To illustrate her technique, she shows me a necklace in which she combined a rock crystal, carved into a perfect ring some 2,500 years ago during the Warring States period, with other antique beads in amethyst, glass and amber from the relatively recent 11th to 18th centuries.
Once she was an established jewellery designer, she began to branch out, learning more about Chinese furniture and architecture. In Anhui province, which she visited over many years from the mid-1990s, she became fascinated with intricately carved 17th-century wooden houses, some panels from which hang in her home. She produced a book documenting those remarkable structures, many of which were destroyed in the frantic years of development that followed.
©Berton ChangInk painting by Shao Fan above a piece by designer Chi Wing Lo; jade, stones and 'lingzh'i on a 19th-century table; ‘Writing Diary with Water’, a series of four photographs by Song Dong
Lo is also an avid art collector. She is perhaps best known for championing Wu Guanzhong, an artist influenced by the French impressionists, many of whose early works were destroyed to avoid persecution in the Cultural Revolution. In 1992, Lo helped Wu to put on an exhibition at the British Museum, a rarity for a living artist. His reputation was cemented and modern Chinese art became more familiar in the west. Wu’s paintings, several of which Lo owns, then cost around $20,000-$40,000 for a work 65cm by 140cm in size. Today they fetch from $900,000 to around $3m.
©Berton ChangKai-Yin Lo’s mismatched shoes
Other painters with whom Lo is associated include Xu Bing, a woodblock artist who left China after 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre but has since returned. One of Xu’s large works, consisting entirely of Chinese characters of Xu’s own invention, hangs on the wall.
Lo still travels widely, lecturing on Chinese art and design and promoting Hong Kong as what she calls “an Asian creative centre”. Next month, the city will host, among other events, a Christie’s sale, the first edition of Art Basel Hong Kong and Hong Kong International Art Fair.
“We are a world-facing city and that gives our people their resourcefulness,” she says. “People say: ‘But in Hong Kong you are so money-minded.’ But that’s a great thing. That’s where we get our energy.”
David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor
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Favourite things
©Berton ChangA recurring motif in Lo’s work is the knot, one of eight Buddhist emblems. Since a knot has no end, it signifies eternity. Some of her favourite objects are knots that she designed herself, made from ivory, bone and wood. She has found examples all over China, India, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia – everywhere Buddhism has been a prominent influence. More recently, she was amazed to discover the same motif in mosques in Iran and Syria. She attributes that to the influence of the Silk Road trading routes that linked ancient China to the Middle East. She also loves lingzhi, literally “supernatural mushrooms” that are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Lo employs them as decoration, a giant one standing alone, and a smaller one as part of a table setting with white mountain jade and stones that she has found, including from a river in the Three Gorges area of China. “I use them like flowers,” she says. The setting takes pride of place on her large round dining table, a 19th-century piece inlaid with bone and ivory.
