The Power Station of Art switched off its industrial grey for the season. Bvlgari filled the old turbine hall with more than three hundred jewels, sorted by colour rather than date, and asked the building to carry the weight.
The exhibition is called Kaleidos: Colors, Cultures and Crafts. It runs at the Power Station of Art from 5 September to 31 October. Shanghai is the latest city to take the show, and the largest space it has occupied so far. The Roman house built the whole thing around colour as the organising idea.
More than three hundred pieces are on view. Some come from the Bvlgari Heritage collection. Others are recent high jewellery. A number were lent from private collections and rarely leave their owners' hands. Set together, they trace how the house arrived at its chromatic signature across the decades.
Three rooms
The show splits into three sections. The Science of Colours looks at how the eye reads a stone. Colour Symbolism turns to meaning, the associations a culture attaches to a given shade. The Power of Light considers what happens as light moves across a gem and its setting.
The structure gives the jewels a reason to sit together beyond their age. A sapphire and an emerald share a case for what they do to light, not for the year they were cut. The curation asks the visitor to treat colour as a material fact, something that behaves in a certain way under certain conditions.
Two artists
Bvlgari brought in two Chinese artists, Liang Manqi and Zhang Ding. Their work sits alongside the jewellery rather than behind glass of its own. The pairing places the Roman house inside a Shanghai conversation, and it keeps the exhibition from reading as a straight archive tour.
Beyond the walls
The exhibition does not stop at the museum doors. Bvlgari Hotel Shanghai carries Kaleidos into its own rooms. Liang Manqi's Portal stands at the entrance. A photographic sequence by Matthieu Lavanchy runs the length of the lobby.
At Bvlgari Dolci, the hotel's chocolate counter, master chocolatier Gianluca Fusto made a limited run keyed to the exhibition's palette. The colour idea reaches the plate. The gesture runs across the city rather than a single gallery.
Bvlgari stopped arranging its jewels by date and started arranging them by wavelength.
The Splendid EditThe Roman thread
Bvlgari has leaned on colour longer than most of its peers. The cabochon cuts, the mixed stones, the willingness to set a green hard against a blue. Shanghai gets that argument laid out in full, room by room, through the end of October.
The Power Station of Art is a former power plant on the Huangpu, all concrete and open volume. The scale suits a show that wants air between the cases. For eight weeks the turbine hall belongs to colour.
Bvlgari Kaleidos: Colors, Cultures and Crafts, Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Courtesy of Bvlgari