©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 Chang A
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.