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專訪香港藏家羅啟妍

(2013-05-23 01:05:14) 下一個
羅能在九十年代初,讚助吳冠中到大英博物館開畫展,應該很有遠見和活動能力。

2013年05月23日 06:43 AM

我抵達羅啟妍(Kai-Yin Lo)位於香港半山區(Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels)的寓所時,她本人並未在家。她是知名首飾設計師、文化曆史學者、策展人以及狂熱藏家,正出席蘇富比的春季拍賣會,香港一年到頭的藝 術係列活動連軸轉,這是其中一站。她給我電話說自己正在往回趕的路上。

她家的菲傭給我開的門,菲傭是香港中產階層生活的標配。菲傭以及其丈夫與羅啟妍一起生活了28年,她本人則一生未嫁。等候羅啟妍時,我上了她家的洗 手間,印象最深的是她家衛生間美國人所謂的“power wall”,(無需提它的具體位置),牆上“雜亂無章”地釘貼著很多照片——她與基辛格(Henry Kissinger)、已故英國前首相撒切爾夫人(Margaret Thatcher)、尼克鬆(Richard Nixon)、皮爾斯•布魯斯南(Piers Brosnan)等眾多大名人的合照。

本人以前曾造訪過她的寓所,但本次光臨,對這麽小的空間裏竟然塞得如此滿滿當當仍頗感驚愕。她的家言語無法形容,多數是五花八門的中國藝術作品、人工製品、收藏品以及物件,它們擺得到處都是,這是她多年來淘寶的結果,其費用基本來自自己首飾銷售的收入。

隨便一瞥,可能看到一幅當代的兔子潑墨畫;朝另一方向瞥視,可能看到兩把明代(Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644)木椅或是安東尼•葛姆雷(Antony Gormley)的大作;朝左看,或許是現代中國繪畫鼻祖吳冠中(Wu Guanzhong)的素描畫《黃山》(“Yellow Mountain”);朝右瞧,或能看到一幅猴子畫作及一些石器製品,它們都已有千年以上曆史。

地 板上堆放著書籍及拍賣目錄;桌麵上則擺著亞寶石以及幾件象牙雕刻品;櫥櫃裏擺放的是宋代(Song Dynasty, 960-1279)白瓷。似乎每一寸牆麵都得以充分利用。在外人看來,這似乎顯得過分擁密,與其說是溫馨的家居空間,倒不如說更象個古玩店。但主人如此設 計及擺放,表明她自己對此頗為心安理得。

此時羅啟妍剛剛進屋,就說自己一直崇尚混搭式的審美觀。“自己剛入道時,就追求率意的平衡感,”她這樣提及自己上世紀70年代的早期設計生涯。“從 一開始,我就覺得非對稱的美感,這是一種自我解脫,也是一種設計風格。”我注意到她本人就穿著一雙怪異的樂福鞋——一隻紅色、一隻則為白色。“這並非做 作,”她說。“本人近幾年一直如此。”

羅啟妍的祖父於19世紀80年代從廣東移居香港。在她眼裏,祖父就是所謂的“鄉紳”,在皇仁書院(Queen’s College)學會英語後,就加入某商行,後來又成了一名買辦——替歐洲人打點公司的中方經理。

“我們是香港所謂的老式家庭,”她說。祖父在太平山(Peak)下的堅尼地道(Kennedy Road)蓋了自己的房子,大英帝國統治時期,這個地段不允許華人居住。“即華人與狗不得入內,”她說。她在堅尼地道長大及上學,此地距離她過去10年居 住的花園道(Garden Road)並不遠。

她目前居住的公寓值好幾百萬英鎊,按照香港擁擠的居住標準,此屋可謂超大戶型。當她說到實際麵積時,我稍有些聽差。“哇,3400平方英尺,”我說。“不,是3500平方英尺,”她糾正我。在香港,寸土寸金並非虛言。

她從小到大都說粵語,但被送至英格蘭南部的蘇塞克斯聖子修道院(Convent of Holy Child Jesus in Sussex)學習英語。“牛津與劍橋我都曾去過,”她說。“但我自己選擇上劍橋,因為劍橋的校園更漂亮。”在劍橋,她學的是歐洲中世紀史,她說這個專業 影響了自己看待物體的方式,所以自己總努力把它們置於曆史的縱深坐標裏。

上世紀70年代回到香港後,羅啟妍才開始進一步了解中國曆 史,主要是通過自己從貓街(Cat Street)市場淘來的東西——翡翠飾品、亞寶石以及小刻件。當時的中國大陸基本處於封閉狀態,所以百姓對這些東西的淵藪知之甚少。有一次,她曾以極便 宜的價格一下子買過20件玉件,隨後多數都作為聖誕禮物送了人,後來才意識到這些物件每件都可能高達1.5萬至2萬美元。

羅啟妍開始把目光轉向首飾,並用中國各個朝代的寶石與小刻件相搭配。“聽起來似乎非常冠冕堂皇,但本人的確是首飾設計的先行者,因為那時候,首飾不是用珍貴寶石(用黃金或白金鑲嵌鑽石)打造而成、就是仿製的服裝首飾,非此即彼。”

她事業的轉折點始於上世紀80年代,當時她在紐約《時代周刊》(Time)上班,有次偶爾造訪第五大道(Fifth Avenue)的卡地亞(Cartier)門店,沒想到門店經理買下了她設計的一些首飾(包括她當時佩戴的那件首飾),於是她開始為奈曼•馬庫斯 (Neiman Marcus)、薩克斯第五大道百貨(Saks Fifth Avenue)、波道夫•古德曼(Bergdorf Goodman)、哈羅德(Harrods)以及日本三越百貨(Mitsukoshi)設計首飾。如今的她主要通過藝術展及網絡銷售自己設計的首飾,並擁 有了一批穩定的客戶擁躉,其中包括希拉裏•克林頓(Hillary Clinton)這樣的名流。羅啟妍一副珍珠與玉的耳環起步價約為400美元。

為了展示自己的技法,她給我展示了一串項鏈,掛件用巧奪天工的圓環(由2500年前戰國時期(Warring States period)一塊無色水晶雕琢而成)與年代相對較近的11至18世紀紫水晶、玻璃以及琥珀打磨的古珠相搭配。

成 為知名首飾設計師後,她開始不斷拓展自己,進一步了解中國家具及建築之精髓。上世紀90年代中葉,她多次造訪安徽省(Anhui province),對當地17世紀精雕細刻的木質房屋癡迷不已,有些木質刻板至今仍張掛在她的香港寓所裏。她為此還專門出了一本書,詳實記錄這些美侖美 奐的古建築,但可惜的是,很多建築在隨後的開發狂潮中遭到破壞。

羅啟妍還是一位狂熱的藝術藏家,或許最出名的莫過於她資助大畫家吳冠中,吳冠中深受法國印象派藝術影響,早期創作的很多作品在文革 (Cultural Revolution)中被付之一炬,原因就是避免遭受迫害。1992年,羅啟妍資助吳冠中在大英博物館(British Museum)舉辦個人畫展,這對於現世畫家來說實屬鳳毛麟角。吳冠中的聲名得以奠定,現代中國藝術也越來越被西方社會所熟悉。吳冠中65厘米×140厘 米見方的畫作(羅啟妍本人收藏了幾幅),當時的標價就達到了2萬至4萬美元,如今它們的售價飆升至90萬美元-300萬美元之間。

與羅啟妍有合作關係的畫家還有版畫藝術家徐冰(Xu Bing),1989年天安門(Tiananmen Square)事件後,徐冰離開中國,但隨後又回到中國,他的其中一件巨幅作品如今就掛在羅啟妍家的牆上,這幅作品全部由徐冰自創的中國漢字組成。

羅仍四處遊曆,介紹中國藝術與設計,並努力推介她所謂香港“亞洲創意中心”的地位。不久,香港將舉辦眾多藝術活動,其中就有佳士得 (Christie’s)夏季拍賣會,這是香港巴塞爾藝術博覽會(Art Basel Hong Kong)以及香港國際藝術展(Hong Kong International Art Fair)的前哨戰。

“香港是麵向全球的城市,所以香港人見多識廣,”羅啟妍說,“大家老說:‘香港人一心鑽在錢眼裏。’但那是個大好事,這正是我們取得不竭力量的源泉。”

戴維•皮林是《金融時報》亞洲版主編

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羅啟妍的鎮家之寶

羅 啟妍作品的永恒主題是“結”,這是佛教八大符號之一。因為結永不終結,所以它寓意永恒。她最喜歡的有些物件就是自己設計的結,它們用象牙、骨頭以及木頭打 造而成。在中國印度、泰國、斯裏蘭卡以及印度尼西亞,她看到這種結隨處可見,佛教對這幾個國家的影響深遠。她把這一切歸因於絲綢之路(Silk Road0的影響,這條貿易通道把古代中國與中東聯結起來。她也特別喜歡靈芝(lingzhi),這種“神奇蘑菇”用在傳統中藥中。羅啟妍把靈芝作為裝飾 物,一株大靈芝獨自矗立,另一株小靈芝則與自己從三峽地區(Three Gorges)某河流中淘來的白玉與奇石一起,作為桌子造型的一部分。“我把它們當作花朵使用,”她說。這個造型擺放在她的長圓餐桌上,尤為顯眼大氣。餐 桌是19世紀的古董,台麵鑲嵌著寶石與象牙。

譯者/常和

May 3, 2013 6:50 pm

At home: Kai-Yin Lo

The jewellery designer’s Hong Kong apartment is home to a vast assortment of Chinese artefacts  
Kai-Yin Lo at home in Hong Kong©Berton Chang

Kai-Yin Lo at home in Hong Kong; in the background are artist Xu Bing’s quotations from Chairman Mao

When I arrive at Kai-Yin Lo’s apartment in Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels, the lady herself is not yet in attendance. A prominent jewellery designer, cultural historian, curator and compulsive collector, Lo is at the Sotheby’s spring auction, one of a series of events in the city’s busy art calendar. She calls me to say she is on her way.

The door is opened by her Filipina maid, a fixture of middle-class Hong Kong living. The maid and her husband have lived with Lo, who has never married, for 28 years. I use the bathroom while I’m waiting and am struck by the density – not to mention the location – of what Americans would call her “power wall”. There are countless photographs pinned in higgledy-piggledy fashion of Lo with Henry Kissinger, Lo with the late Margaret Thatcher, Lo with Richard Nixon, Lo with Piers Brosnan and many other luminaries.

I’ve been to the apartment before, but am taken aback once more by just how much is crammed into this space. Her home is choc-a-bloc with a mind-boggling assortment of mostly Chinese art, artefacts, collectables and objects that she has picked up over the years, financed for the most part by her jewellery sales.

A glance this way might reveal a contemporary ink-brush painting of a rabbit; a peek in the other direction, a pair of wooden Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) chairs or a drawing by Antony Gormley. Look to the left and there’s a sketch of the “Yellow Mountain” by Wu Guanzhong, considered a founder of modern Chinese painting; to the right, a picture of a monkey and some stone artefacts, not one of which is less than a thousand years old.

On the floor there are heaps of books and auction catalogues; on the tabletops, semi-precious stones and pieces of carved ivory; and in the cabinets, white ceramics from the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Seemingly every inch of wall space is occupied. In any one else’s hands, this might be all too much, more curio shop than comfort­able living space. But Lo’s sense of design and arrangement means that she just about gets away with it.

Lo, who has just arrived, tells me her aesthetic sensibility has always been to mix and match. “I began to balance without balancing,” she says of her early days as a designer in the 1970s. “From the beginning, I thought that asymmetry was good. It’s a way of freeing yourself, and also a device.” I notice that she is wearing an odd pair of loafers, one red and one white. “It’s not affectation,” she says. “I can’t remember within my recent conscious state ever doing otherwise.”

Lo’s grandfather came to Hong Kong in the 1880s from Guangdong province. He had been what she calls a “village squire” and, after learning English at Queen’s College, he joined a merchant bank and later became a comprador, a Chinese manager of a European business.

“We were among the so-called older families of Hong Kong,” she says. He built a house on Kennedy Road, just below the Peak, an area in which the Chinese were not permitted to live under British colonial rule. “That’s right, dogs and Chinese were not allowed,” she says. She grew up and went to school on Kennedy Road, not far from where she has lived for the past 10 years on Garden Road.

Art on Kai-Yin Lo’s walls©Berton Chang

Art on Kai-Yin Lo’s walls includes work by Antony Gormley and Cy Twombly

Her current apartment, which must be worth several million pounds, is enormous by the city’s cramped standards. I slightly mishear when she tells me the size. “Wow, 3,400 sq ft,” I say. “3,500,” she corrects me. In Hong Kong, every square foot counts.

She was brought up speaking Cantonese, but sent to the Convent of Holy Child Jesus in Sussex, southern England, to polish her English. “I got into both Oxford and Cambridge,” she says, “but I chose Cambridge because it’s prettier.” There she studied European medieval history, a discipline, she says, that has influenced the way she looks at objects and seeks to place them in context.

It was only on her return to Hong Kong in the 1970s that she began to learn more about Chinese history, principally through the pieces she bought from Cat Street market: jade ornaments, semi-precious stones and little carvings. In those days, when China was more or less closed, people didn’t know much about such items. She once bought 20 pieces of jade for next to nothing and gave most of them away as Christmas presents. It was only later that she realised they could have been worth $15,000 or $20,000 apiece.

Japanese and Chinese objects from the 18th and 19th centuries©Berton Chang

Japanese and Chinese objects from the 18th and 19th centuries and a third-century Gandara figure

Lo began turning her finds into jewellery, matching stones and little carvings from disparate periods of Chinese history. “I may sound very grand, but I really was a pioneer in jewellery design because in those days jewellery was either made of precious stones – diamonds set with gold or platinum – or it was fake costume jewellery. There was virtually nothing in between.”

Her breakthrough came in the 1980s when she was working in New York for Time magazine and stopped by a Cartier shop on Fifth Avenue. The manager bought some of her pieces (including the one she was wearing) and that led to her designing for Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Harrods and Mitsukoshi in Japan. These days, she sells mostly through art fairs or the internet, and has a stable of loyal clients, including the likes of Hillary Clinton. Her pieces start at around $400 for a pair of pearl and jade earrings.

To illustrate her technique, she shows me a necklace in which she combined a rock crystal, carved into a perfect ring some 2,500 years ago during the Warring States period, with other antique beads in amethyst, glass and amber from the relatively recent 11th to 18th centuries.

Once she was an established jewellery designer, she began to branch out, learning more about Chinese furniture and architecture. In Anhui province, which she visited over many years from the mid-1990s, she became fascinated with intricately carved 17th-century wooden houses, some panels from which hang in her home. She produced a book documenting those remarkable structures, many of which were destroyed in the frantic years of development that followed.

Artworks inside Kai-Yin Lo's flat©Berton Chang

Ink painting by Shao Fan above a piece by designer Chi Wing Lo; jade, stones and 'lingzh'i on a 19th-century table; ‘Writing Diary with Water’, a series of four photographs by Song Dong

Lo is also an avid art collector. She is perhaps best known for championing Wu Guanzhong, an artist influenced by the French impressionists, many of whose early works were destroyed to avoid persecution in the Cultural Revolution. In 1992, Lo helped Wu to put on an exhibition at the British Museum, a rarity for a living artist. His reputation was cemented and modern Chinese art became more familiar in the west. Wu’s paintings, several of which Lo owns, then cost around $20,000-$40,000 for a work 65cm by 140cm in size. Today they fetch from $900,000 to around $3m.

Kai-Yin Lo’s mismatched shoes©Berton Chang

Kai-Yin Lo’s mismatched shoes

Other painters with whom Lo is associated include Xu Bing, a woodblock artist who left China after 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre but has since returned. One of Xu’s large works, consisting entirely of Chinese characters of Xu’s own invention, hangs on the wall.

Lo still travels widely, lecturing on Chinese art and design and promoting Hong Kong as what she calls “an Asian creative centre”. Next month, the city will host, among other events, a Christie’s sale, the first edition of Art Basel Hong Kong and Hong Kong International Art Fair.

“We are a world-facing city and that gives our people their resourcefulness,” she says. “People say: ‘But in Hong Kong you are so money-minded.’ But that’s a great thing. That’s where we get our energy.”

David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor

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Favourite things

knots©Berton Chang

A recurring motif in Lo’s work is the knot, one of eight Buddhist emblems. Since a knot has no end, it signifies eternity. Some of her favourite objects are knots that she designed herself, made from ivory, bone and wood. She has found examples all over China, India, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia – everywhere Buddhism has been a prominent influence. More recently, she was amazed to discover the same motif in mosques in Iran and Syria. She attributes that to the influence of the Silk Road trading routes that linked ancient China to the Middle East. She also loves lingzhi, literally “supernatural mushrooms” that are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Lo employs them as decoration, a giant one standing alone, and a smaller one as part of a table setting with white mountain jade and stones that she has found, including from a river in the Three Gorges area of China. “I use them like flowers,” she says. The setting takes pride of place on her large round dining table, a 19th-century piece inlaid with bone and ivory.

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