A QUESTION of TIME

Curator Alba Cappellieri reveals the hidden gems behind Van Cleef & Arpels' latest exhibition, Time, Nature, Love, now on in Seoul.

- GORDON NG

Funny thing, time. How is high jewellery meant to straddle the contradiction of being timeless yet timely? It has be an ageless heirloom that can be passed from generation to generation, yet of its time so that it speaks to the moment of its creation. This was the *controversial question that the Italian curator, writer and educator Alba Cappellieri had on her mind when she devised the Time, Nature, Love exhibition for Van Cleef & Arpels. The exhibition, now in its fourth edition after stops in Milan, Shanghai and Riyadh, is on show at D Museum in Seoul until 14 April.

"Time is a very important ingredient of design because every object must represent its time," Cappellieri explains of this sticking point. It's a conceptually ambitious project, bringing together over 300 pieces from the house's archives, which spans more than a century. "My intention for this exhibition was to present not just the hero pieces-big stones, big diamonds," she explains. "The archive is so rich, so beautiful, that I decided there are some hidden jewels I would like to present."

The process of curating the exhibition took over two years of rooting about the Van Cleef & Arpels archives. Cappellieri recounts looking through more than 1,000 pieces of jewellery, sketches and registers. Registers were particularly important to the curator as they told a rich story of the house's international clientele and their varied tastes. After getting a material overview, she decided to centre the project around time. Works by the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the Korean philosopher Byung-chul Han, provided Cappellieri with the exhibition's conceptual framework.