While both of her parents were in the jewellery wholesale business (her father focuses on gemstones and her mother on jade and pearls), Anna Hu never expected to be involved in the jewellery world. Born in Taiwan, and then educated in the USA, she was dreaming of a career as a cello player when shoulder tendonitis cut short her hopes. “I was devastated and suffering from a sense of loss, when my father suggested I applied for a GIA course in New York. I fell in love with jewellery design as soon as I had my first class. I realized that while a window had closed, a new one had opened. I wasn’t a performer anymore, I was a composer,” she recalls.

After gaining her GIA qualification, Hu studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology as well as Parsons School of Design and Columbia University, before getting her first job as an intern at Christie's jewellery department in New York. She then moved on to Van Cleef & Arpels, working in its special jewellery department coordinating the design workshop and private clients, and later joined Harry Winston in merchandising and inventories. But as she was about to turn 30, Hu felt she “needed to write my own song, find my own voice.”

 “At the time, the Plaza hotel in New York had a space for a small boutique, and my mentor, Maurice Galli, who was the head designer at Harry Winston, encouraged me to go for it,” she recalls.

Since she founded her namesake company in 2007, the jeweller has focused on creating exclusive high jewellery pieces characterized by their bold scale and sense of movement, which have quickly become collectable at auction.   

Francois Curiel, Chairman of Christie's Europe and Asia & Head of Christie's Global Luxury Division, describes Hu’s pieces as offering a “unique equilibrium of proportion, construction, colour, and dazzle,” while Yvonne Chu, Acting Head of Department, Jewellery, Sotheby’s praises the jewellery artist for her ability to transform top quality gemstones into “inspirational jewellery masterpieces.”

Hu says “I’m really creating my jewellery as if I’m composing a piece of music, with every single stone a music note, it can be at sonata scale to symphony level. There is a beautiful melodic line and colour harmonies.”

She likens some of her jewellery pieces to Rachmaninov’s music “very romantic with lot of intensity,” or Schubert “with a twisted nostalgia, a sentimental tone.”

But her cultural references, often infused with oriental aesthetics, go beyond music. Her Siren’s Aria ring, which features a 22.82-carat emerald surrounded by a swirl of Paraiba tourmalines, was inspired by Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa woodblock print, while her elaborate Monet Water Lily necklace is an ode to the Impressionist painter’s colourful garden.

Hu has a weakness for blue Kashmir sapphires and often incorporates them in her designs, relatively easily given a lot of her designs are related to the ocean and waves.

In October, Sotheby’s Hong Kong offered five new pieces created by Hu as part of its Magnificent Jewels and Jadeite Autumn Sale. The specially commissioned pieces were inspired by the musical and cultural exchanges that took place along the Silk Road and the star piece, the Dunhuang Pipa Necklace, sold for HK$xxx million (est. HK$40-50 million / US$5 – 6.25 million), setting a new record [[TBC]] for the jeweller at auction. It featured a stunning 100.02-carat fancy intense yellow diamond. Hu says she was inspired by the Unesco-listed Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes in China’s Western Gansu Province and the imagery of a lady dancing while playing the pipa (a four-stringed Chinese lute). 

Not wanting to be “too literal by creating something figurative,” Hu instead abstracted the fluidity of the dancer’s movement into a diamond necklace that flows like a stylized ribbon holding a pipa (represented by the sizeable central diamond). Hu admits it was possibly one of the most technically challenging jewels she’s ever created because the diamond ‘pipa’ can be worn as a separate brooch and an earring. The dazzling jewel, like all her pieces, was created in an atelier in Paris.

Also on offer at Sotheby’s was her Blue Magpie brooch, two sapphire birds kissing above a tiny golden nest holding a beautiful conch pearl, which the jeweller declare as her personal favourite piece in the new collection. “This piece was inspired by the motif on the traditional Chinese blue-and-white porcelain plate and by paintings created by Giuseppe Castiglione, a Jesuit missionary at the imperial court of China,” she explains. It sold for xxxxx (est. HK$ 1,500,000 – 1,800,000 / US$190,000 – 225,000). 

Hu, who divides her time between New York and Monaco, says the collaboration with Sotheby’s was a “duet” which each side bringing their own voice, but the whole project came like a firework in her head. “Actually what you see, the five pieces, are the abstract of over 100 ideas and concepts.”

THIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NOVEMBER ISSUE OF A: THE FIRST OF