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At the Hong Kong Palace Museum, jewelry becomes a way of thinking rather than merely a means of decoration. The exhibition "Treasures of Global Jewellery from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Body Transformed" turns Gallery 8 into an extended reflection on why we wear adornments and how they transform the bodies they touch.
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Jointly organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Hong Kong Palace Museum, the show also marks the American institution's debut in the city.
The exhibition brings together around 200 masterpieces of jewelry from the MET collections, spanning continents and nearly 4,000 years, from the second millennium BCE to the 21st century.
Rather than following a regional or chronological sequence, the pieces are grouped into five thematic sections that progress from ancient ritual objects to courtly splendor and cutting-edge contemporary design.
This structure encourages visitors to compare how different cultures across time have used jewelry to signal status, belief, protection, or desire. Seen in Hong Kong, the show inevitably reads against a backdrop of local goldsmiths, jade traditions, and the city's appetite for branded luxury jewelry.
In this context, the exhibition broadens its scope, framing adornment as an instinct shared across cultures. Headdresses, brooches, and necklaces are grouped to show how they attract attention and animate the body.
Further on, the mood shifts towards experimentation: unconventional materials and bold, sculptural forms treat the body not as a backdrop for decoration but as a space to be shaped and reimagined.
An audio guide adds context, telling the stories behind selected works – from ancient Colombian gold to European tiaras.
Selected pieces from the Hong Kong Palace Museum's Mengdiexuan and Chris Hall collections, alongside loans from the Illuminata Collection, are integrated into the exhibition, grounding it in collections long nurtured here. In doing so, the show positions the museum as a serious player in the global conversation about objects and their meanings.
Running until October 19, "The Body Transformed" lingers beyond the gallery walls. It leaves you newly attuned to the language of adornment and to how jewelry can signal identity, status, or intention long before words are spoken.
Bernard Charnwut Chan is the chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District
