Click here for Q&A with Kai-Yin Lo

A designer of style and innovation, Kai-Yin Lo is a pioneer who bridged the gap between precious and fashion jewelry. Her highly recognizable designs sum up divergent elements: an Eastern sensibility with Western aesthetics, originality with wearibility, easy elegance with comfortable affordability. With her brand name YIN-INSPIRED, she has created a range of precious jewelry using pearl, jade and colored stones that carries her sure touch of simple elegance and stylish nonchalance. In addition, her traditional Chinese designs are given a new interpretation, all the time maintaining emphasis on wearability and graphic simplicity.

Apart from being Hong Kong’s most successful jewelry designer, she is also a well-known historian, patron and Chinese art collector. She has written three books on Chinese art and culture. Lo, who studied medieval history at Cambridge, started making jewelry by chance in New York as a hobby and ended up selling her entire first collection to Cartier. A strong interest in Chinese history led her to acquire a collection of ancient ceramics and jewelry, and it was out of her collection of loose pieces of jade and precious stones that she started to create her own designs. They included fashioning a belt buckle from the Han dynasty into a pendant and stringing together two halves of a jade disc to form a necklace. “My jewelry has always reflected my passion for antiques”. No two jewels are alike, and each of her collections are designed to flow with fashion. When she started her career designing antique jewelry, she found it very difficult to find a matching pair of jade or whatever other stones she was working with. So she said, “Why should I balance with matching? I can balance with imbalance”. The spirit of mismatching has also rubbed off on her sense of style. She hardly ever wears shoes that match. She was once spotted wearing a leopard spotted slipper on one foot and a blue floral one on the other.

“Number one is that I love color,” Lo says, “I must work with real materials, hence the stones.” Both emotionally and practically Lo puts herself into her designs. As a career woman on the move, she identified a need for jewelry that looks elegant and classy without living in a hotel safe. “Traditionally people think of jewelry as valuable in terms of investment,” she says. “To me the real value is what applies to your life.”

Q&A with Kai-Yin Lo
For more information, go to www.kaiyinlo-design.com

You are known for your philosophy of balancing with imbalance. Can you explain more how this approach shapes your jewelry designs? How does this inform your interest in traditional and contemporary Chinese art?

In my initial collections, I found that finding a pair of matching antique carvings or beads was difficult - hence I dispensed with matching. I balance with volume and not by matching. This conforms with the Daoist principle of Ying and Yang, light and shade, fullness and void -the last has been a major factor practised in Chinese painting - the void can speak volumes and opposing is at the same time coordinating.

Your jewelry designs grew from your interest and passion for antiques. How did you begin collecting antiques?

I studied European history at Cambridge and London Universities and I did not know that much about Chinese history till when I returned to Hong Kong from Europe, and collecting small pieces of jades and carvings in semi-precious stones was my entry. Putting these together to wear as part of my everyday life started my jewelry career and my lifelong interest in Chinese art.

You were groundbreaking as a pioneer in making semi-precious stones a mainstay in jewelry design and starting the semi-precious or bridge department in stores. Are there any new trends in jewelry that you currently see happening?

Jewelry design now merges with art pieces and materials are diverse - not necessarily precious or semi-precious. Plastic, resin, wood and metal ---all sorts of materials are used.

How has Hong Kong's culture influenced your work?

Hong Kong, an outward-looking international city with a distinctive east/west lifestyle, has shaped my vision that jewelry and, indeed, design need international flair. Being interested in Chinese arts and culture, I have retained my heritage as a foundation for modern designs for global markets.

I have read that you enjoy the design and scholarly side to your work more than the business side. However, you have been able to manage a very successful business for years. What have been some of your biggest business challenges and what have you learned along the way?

I was in the US and international markets for 20 years - establishing myself, building a brand, pursuing a new direction in jewelry design. I did it - business, merchandising and creating. I learned a lot and this is the foundation of my knowledge on branding and knowledge on business and design. (I was lucky with the US market but it still took two years before Neiman and Saks started a bridge department to house my semi-precious jewelry. Hitherto there were only 2 departments - precious jewelry with diamonds and sapphires etc was housed in the precious department and fake or custume jewelry in the costume department. Entering the Japanese market as an Asian brand-name was very trying and took 5 years). I worked and learned hard. I sold my company in 1996 just before Hong Kong reverted to China. By 2000 I wanted to enter another phase in life - to devote more time to scholarly and cultural pursuits which I did not have time for. So I confined my selling activities to private shows and left the retail market.

I understand the business side - that is why I am a champion of promoting the creative industries as propellers of economic and social development in society. I Iecture and write on this subject in international forums and as board member of the Hong Kong Design Centre and Visiting Professor of the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China's premier design academy.

You have worked on books examining the domestic realm in China, particularly the home and objects in it, and how they reveal aspects of Chinese society. Are there aspects of your own home that you feel express who you are?