Taiwan Today

Claire Fang-chu Lin has for many years been an accomplished maker of antique bead adornments, and is known for her stylish Chinese knot designs. Recently, Sotheby's Hong Kong began to recognize her talent in jewelry design.

Claire Fang-chu Lin used to shy away from publicity. She was not being arrogant, she just preferred to mind her own business: designing jewelry. The idea of exposing herself to the public gives her the creeps. But sometimes change is inevitable. When it was announced last summer that a piece of jewelry designed by Lin would be included in the fall 1998 auction at Sotheby's Hong Kong, Taiwan's media started hounding her for stories. When that happened, Lin found it very difficult to say "No" and just walk away. After all, not every jewelry designer gets to have her work "endorsed" by Sotheby's.

Lin was the second jewelry designer from Taiwan to enter Sotheby's Hong Kong auction, after Kung Tsun-tzu, another promising local jewelry artist in recent years. However, the fact that Lin taught herself how to design and create jewelry after several years as a small-scale maker of antique bead adornments easily distinguishes her from other jewelry designers. She had been an accomplished artist for close to fifteen years before she entered the field of jewelry design three years ago.

Admirers of Lin's work say they like her use of antique beads, which she makes into necklaces and earrings by skillfully and creatively employing Chinese knotting techniques. They also marvel at the way Lin combines disparate colors into a harmonious whole. Most of all, Lin's designs are not only a feast for the eyes; they are also functional, enabling the wearers to create impressive and sometimes theatrical effects.

Jessica Ho, a thirty-six-year-old antique bead collector, describes her first experience with Lin's bead ornaments as an astonishing and wonderful surprise of "beauty in the bead." Ho says she was introduced to Lin's artwork by a friend who had been telling her "about this woman who makes great necklaces and bracelets out of antique beads." An aficionado of antique beads, Ho was not initially concerned about Lin's designs; what really interested her was the beads Lin used for her materials. "But the moment I stepped into her shop and saw with my own eyes the things she had made," Ho confesses, "I said to myself, 'Wow!' I mean, I was flabbergasted. I didn't know until then that people could actually turn these timeworn, dusty, battered beads into such gorgeous pieces of work. It was as if Lin, with her originality and clever hands, had brought the beads back to life. The beads seemed to become all shiny and bright again."

Ho also admits that her first and subsequent encounters with Lin's beadworks changed her stereotyped impression of Chinese knotting. As Ho explains, most designs that involve traditional Chinese knotting tend to be loud and noisy in coloring and "busy" in pattern. But not Lin's version of Chinese knotting. Ho's critical eye for fashion and style finds excellence in Lin's knotting skills and ingenuity in her matching of materials. As Ho says, "I never liked things with Chinese knotting patterns because they always seemed rather garish. But Lin is able to make them look elegant, refined, even cool--by daringly employing yarns in neutral hues, rather than the traditionally used bright and contrasting colors such as black and red, yellow and green. And the result is fascinating. It doesn't matter if you're wearing an Armani suit or a Donna Karan silk dress--Lin's bead necklaces look fabulous and chic on both."

Like Ho, many of Lin's female customers prefer adornments that are both functional and nice to look at; others, how ever, like to cherish them for purely aesthetic appreciation. Hungshih Chang, a well-respected Taipei-area scholar of antique beads and Tibetan art, once commissioned Lin to make some of his bead collections into several necklaces, which he later had framed and displayed in his apartment. "Each individual bead must be appreciated on its own terms. But it also gives one pleasure to observe beads in organic forms, from a distance. The experience is quite sensational."

Lin started bringing antique beads into her creative sphere when she began making fashion accessories for fun while she was majoring in history at Tunghai University in Taichung, central Taiwan, sixteen years ago. At the time, designs with Chinese knot patterns were fashionable--and often expensive. Quite a lot of young girls who did not have much money to buy handmade necklaces with Chinese knotting chose to make their own, and Lin was one of them. The "do-it-yourself" concept that is now so popular on the island was still foreign to most people here.

Lin learned everything about Chinese knotting from a single book and by observing the work of others. By God-given talent she was yet to discover, and by working with persistence, Lin was able to master the skill and train herself in design and coloring. This would allow her to go into business for herself later on. According to Lin, turning a hobby into a business was totally unexpected. As she says, "When I was doing those bead-and-knot adornments, it was just for fun. All the time I was thinking that after graduating from college I would just work in some trade or publishing company for a living, get married, have children, then retire and age gracefully. Who would've foreseen that this nice little hobby would one day become my livelihood?"

As soon as Lin graduated from Tunghai in 1983, she took a nine-to-five office job in Taipei, but it did not work out for her. The rigid corporate culture did not suit her free spirit. She says, "I never like to be confined to a certain, fixed environ ment. I felt suffocated in that office." She gave up the nine-to-five lifestyle, figuring that maybe she could do something with her Chinese knotting skills and bead-collecting hobby. So with the help of her boyfriend, Lin began selling her homemade fashion accessories from behind a little desk in the corner of a friend's pottery shop. "I didn't have any money to start my own business. The best I could do was ask my friend to rent me a small space in his shop. I really wasn't sure I could make it," she says. "It was just an experiment."

The way Lin integrated Chinese knotting designs into her beaded fashion adornments soon attracted people who asked her to custom-make necklaces and earrings to go with their outfits. In less than two years, her little desk was transformed into a small shop of her own, so she would have space to display her works and to accommodate the increasing number of customers. She picked up some ideas about Western knotting styles from books and started to incorporate them into her own work. In addition, to break away from cliché, Lin decided to have her own yarns custom-made. The variety of yarns for Chinese knotting one was able to find in the market was simply too limited at that time.

In the beginning, Lin could only afford imported African trade beads--mainly glass beads used between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries by Europeans to trade products made in the African communities they were colonizing. They were much cheaper compared with other types of beads in the market at the time, and they brought on a unique charm with their buoyant African colors. They reminded Lin of her hometown, Taitung, a small city in eastern Taiwan. It was there that she had learned to adore the beauty of differing ethnicities, growing up among the animated, brightly hued handicrafts made by the large communities of indigenous peoples in the surrounding areas. In fact, it was African trade beads that gave Lin her initiation into the world of antique beads, and which later made her a bead collector.

In the mid-1980s, Lin's materials evolved from the inexpensive African trade beads to more costly, rare antique beads and gemstones. Her favored collections include dZi beads--charms cherished by Tibetan Buddhists--and other types of beads made of amber, agate, carnelian, gold, turquoise, tourmaline and wood. They can be traced back hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of years. When Tibetan Buddhism became popular in Taiwan during the late 1980s, Lin was asked to make all sorts of things with dZi beads. Adherents of Tibetan Buddhism believe that dZi beads are powerful amulets that protect the wearers from evil spirits. "I can't tell how many dZi-bead necklaces I did at that time," Lin admits. "There've been so many. At one time they were so popular that it seemed all I was doing was just stringing dZi beads into necklaces, bracelets and hangings."

Asked why she favors antique beads, Lin says she thinks it has something to do with her college major, history. She says, "I admire things that reflect old cultures. They give me this feeling of timelessness that is so simple and beautiful, yet so deep and mysterious. Anything beautiful lasts forever." Lin also believes that each bead has its own temperament, and that if we listen carefully, "each will tell a story."

Of all the old beads, Lin is fondest of glass beads from China's Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.). This is partly because she is Chinese, and partly because it required highly developed skills to make such beads in ancient times. As Lin explains, Chinese Warring States beads, once treasured by Chinese aristocrats, are rare today, and are therefore quite expen sive. Lin tells of the sadness she experienced when a necklace she had created in one of her favorite designs out of Warring States beads for a customer was lost right after the customer bought it. "She left it in a taxi, by accident," Lin laments. "I always wonder who found it and whether they appreciate it and realize the value of the beads."

Lin looks for antique beads wherever she goes. Since the ROC government began to permit Taiwan residents to visit mainland China, she has traveled there many times. She says she always fears that beautiful and rare Chinese beads are in danger of disappearing, or that others will snatch them away before she finds them. While in the mainland, Lin sets her searching eyes on other things that can be used as materials, such as Chinese snuff bottles from the Ching Dynasty (1644 -1911), which she can turn into the centerpiece of a necklace. She makes similar use of Western materials: "When I saw old curtain fringes in some small shops in Paris, I found them irresistible. I just had to have them. I didn't know what I would do with them at the time, but I knew I would find a way eventually." And she did, transforming them into one pendant after another.

It was in this way that Lin built up her reputation as a jewelry designer step by step. In 1990, seven years since her beginnings at the small desk in the corner of her friend's shop, Lin had her first exhibition. Since then, she has had at least one exhibition a year. In 1992 she moved from her small, private shop to a much bigger and more conspicuous site on a major Taipei thoroughfare. In 1997, Lin's first book, Words about Necklaces Made of Precious Stones, was published, showing how her designs had evolved from 1992 to 1996. The same year, the American quarterly Ornament flew its editor in from California to do a story on Lin and her works. The following year, Japan's leading newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, sent a reporter from Tokyo to interview Lin.

The piece that was entered in Sotheby's Hong Kong auction was a fine pendant made of precious mineral and organic gemstones (jade, diamond, ruby, and mother of pearl), in a style favored by many Chinese women. It has the design of Lin's signature style: patterns representing auspicious symbols of Chinese culture. The jade part in the center, for instance, takes the shape of an ancient Chinese scepter called ju-i. A double meaning was intended, as ju-i also means "as one wishes" in Chinese. The two bats that flank the jade scepter are made of mother of pearl, as is the gourd mounted on the diamond and ruby ring above the jade scepter. The words for "bat" and "gourd" are pronounced in Mandarin Chinese as fu--the same pronunciation as that of the Chinese character signifying "prosperity". Altogether this extravagant piece of jewelry is a design meant to beautify the wearer and (even more importantly) bring good fortune and happiness. The piece sold at Sotheby's for HK$45,000 (US$5,800)--twice its estimated value.

Lin entered the field of jewelry design several years after she had been making antique bead ornaments, about three years ago. It was a time during which she was beginning to have difficulty finding the best beads for raw materials to match customers' growing expectations and demands. "Customers' tastes have grown, as my own work has developed. They've become choosier about the quality of their beads and everything. Before, they might be easily settled on an ordinary bead, but more and more they ask for something that is unique, rare, of good quality, and yet affordable." In terms of both quality and quantity, the beads Lin is able to find and use are becoming less; at the same time, as might be expected, they are going up in price. She realized that the time had come for her to make some major changes, and that if she wanted to continue her career in the field of jewelry design, she must learn to survive in the ebb and flow of the market.

Experimenting with how to combine old metal curios with antique beads and pendants had been one of Lin's interests for some time. Little by little, she stopped using yarn chains and began to use old silver and gold chains, adding new metal decorations onto beads and parts made from gemstones. Her materials also gradually expanded to rock crystal, pearl, mother of pearl, jade, emerald, coral, ruby and diamond, which she hired craftsmen to carve into various shapes and patterns. After some encouraging trial sales, Lin announced in 1997 that she was formally leaving her work with beaded ornamentation and embarking on the production of jewelry.

It was not long before Lin discovered the difference between her new jewelry and her previous creations. For one thing, she found that she had less control over the process of making jewelry because it involved not only the designer herself but also goldsmiths and craftsmen in charge of carving the various stones. Lin says she initially spent more time trying to communicate with craftsmen than she did in the design process. "Maybe it's got something to do with their training, but stone-carvers and metalworkers here tend to be kind of hard to work with when it comes to getting them to do unconventional designs. It's like they'd rather just follow the carving patterns they learned a long time ago," Lin says. Therefore, she often feels frustrated when she fails to get the desired effect. There are times she truly wishes she knew how to carve stone herself. "But I'm well aware of the fact that it takes many, many years--not to mention talent--to be a good carver of gemstones. I might as well just concentrate on designing," she smiles.

Most of Lin's customers from the past miss her Chinese-styled bead works, and they still come to see Lin regularly, hoping that she has some new items in the former style. At the same time, there are both old and new customers who prefer her jewelry designs because they seem to blend more easily with today's fashions. Lin understands their concerns. She admits that "while many people appreciate my bead adornments, not all of them can wear them with ease. The beaded necklaces and bracelets are too exotic, too wild for them. It takes a certain temperament of wearer to feel comfortable, or even confident, with my beads."

Today, the thirty-eight-year-old Lin continues to sit behind the small desk that has been keeping her company for the past fifteen years. Two years ago, she hired an assistant, and she has recently been contemplating whether she should move again. A bigger shop and studio would be good for business, as would a larger area for her customers to park their cars. Lin is also wondering about how to improve the carving quality of gemstones and if her craftsmen will be able to make more sophisti cated designs. But will she stop making bead adornments? "Of course not," Lin laughs. "It just takes longer for me to collect the materials I like before I can do anything with them."

Copyright 1999 by Winnie Chang.