Jewellery is the world’s oldest art form, predating cave paintings by tens of thousands of years. Throughout history and across cultures, it has served to extend and amplify the human body, accentuating, enhancing, distorting, and transforming. Traversing time and place, this exhibition explores what jewellery is, why we wear it, and how it activates the body it adorns—probing in the process a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human.
Unfolding a series of remarkable stories from a global history of jewellery, the exhibition features approximately 200 masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, spanning five continents and nearly 4,000 years from the second millennium BCE to the 21st century. Organised in five thematic sections, the exhibition traces the development of adornments from ancient civilisations to cutting-edge contemporary creations. Each section explores a distinct dimension of bodily adornment, offering insights into both the wearers and the cultures that shaped these diverse, yet related, works of art. These groupings of objects are clustered together to stimulate comparative thinking about these works of art across times and cultures.
The exhibition is jointly organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Hong Kong Palace Museum. Additional works on display are from the Hong Kong Palace Museum’s Mengdiexuan Collection, the Chris Hall Collection at the Hong Kong Palace Museum, and the ILLUMINATA Collection. Cathay and American Express are the Major Sponsors of the exhibition. Mr Alan Chan provided artistic direction for the exhibition’s graphic design. The performance footage is provided by Hong Kong Ballet.