The Flight of the Butterflies by Wallace Chan
Wallace Chan has captured the butterfly essence in his Fluttery Brooches collection: an expression of the Hong Kong artist-jeweler's high jewelry virtuosity, the brooches feature in a book dedicated to his passion-obsession for these creatures
See butterflies in flight and you are immediately whisked away to an enchanted world of colors and drawings, poetry and music. A world that, in jewelry and goldsmithing, has been interpreted in many different ways, reaching ideal extremes and inviting playful experimentation. Depicting the grace and lightness of these extraordinary creatures with stones and metals is no easy matter. While many designers have passed the test brilliantly, one above all has gone beyond all earthly imagination, allowing technique to take him by the hand and passion to lead him: Wallace Chan. An artist-jeweler from Hong Kong, Wallace is the author of a "story" starring butterflies turned into brooches, earrings, necklaces and rings with rubies, sapphires, amethysts, tsavorites, jades, diamonds and even small fragments of preserved and regenerated insects. 50 of these masterpieces have now been collected and preserved in "Winged Beauty: The Butterfly Jewellery Art of Wallace Chan", a 240-page book with a hundred photos, edited by Emily Stoehrer, curator of jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Melanie Grant, journalist for The Economist, and Juliet Weir-de Rochefoucauld, jewelry expert. A summary of the art of a master who is, above all, an innovator and experimenter, the inventor of The Wallace Cut, a three-dimensional carving technique, of a patented technology to increase the luminosity of jadeite and, more recently, of The Wallace Chan Porcelain, a material five times more resistant than steel. But he is also a philosopher: "Life is but a dream; it is for us to decide whether we want it to be the dream of a man or the dream of a butterfly. I couldn't decide and so I became The Butterfly Man.»
