A precious journey

Taking his cue from an exhibition in Hong Kong, Gennady Oreshkin maps the trajectory of minerals in Chinese material culture. Turned into jewelry and decorative objects since ancient times, they can be found today in items of everyday wear, like watches.

China is rich in minerals. Precious stones like diamonds, sapphires and rubies can be sourced from the mines in the northern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. The southern province of Guangdong and the neighboring Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on the other hand, are home to fluorite, quartz, malachite, serpentine jade and chalcedony mines.

Specimens collected from some of these locations, as well as elsewhere in the world, are now on display at the Journey with Minerals exhibition, hosted by L'cole Asia Pacific School of Jewelry Arts. As its name suggests, the show presents a fascinating array of minerals that are most commonly used to make jewelry and also in other ways. Highlights include a piece of gold-toned pyrite mined in La Rioja, Spain; an extraordinary piece of naturally sculpted spherical pyrite perched on a bed of quartz from Romania; a Mexican opal with rhyolite nodules; and an unpolished tektite as well as an azurite from Guangdong.

Eloïse Gaillou, director of the Mineralogy Museum of the cole des Mines de Paris - L'cole Asia Pacific's collaborator on the show - says that the azurite piece from Guangdong, which is on loan from her institute, "entered our collection thanks to an exchange made with a museum in Beijing back in 1980". The piece, referred to as a "flower" for its eye-catching organic form, is a testament to the exquisite handiwork of nature.