Wallace Chan invents a super porcelain for his high jewelry ♦ ︎
The jewelery? An activity for hard people. With hard materials, of course. Its knews also by jeweler-artist Wallace Chan, who revealed to the New York Times that he has succeeded in inventing an even harder material than steel: porcelain. But not the porcelain that is used for teacups. In fact, it is a porcelain created to be used in jewelry and with a greater resistance than metal.
Do you have to believe him? Yes, Wallace Chan is a Hong Kong jeweler who does not stop at any technical difficulty. His jewelry-sculptures are examples of the creative virtuosity of which he is capable. As a testament to his invention, the designer showed a large blue porcelain ring surmounted by a diamond and hit him violently on the table. The jewel has not even to go through a scratch. To make this material Chan took seven years, but he obtained a porcelain five times harder than steel. The jeweler also gave him a name: Wallace Chan Porcelain.
How did made it? It’s an industrial secret, he says. It is only known that this jewelry porcelain is made in two German furnaces at about 1,650 degrees Celsius (3,000 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature that is about 200 degrees Celsius higher than the traditional process. The super-resistant porcelain is Chan’s second major innovation, which introduced the Wallace Cut in the 1970s, a method for carving precious gems like cameos and making it famous.
Chan uses super porcelain together with titanium, the metal that has often been used for his elaborate jewels, so much so as to represent a characteristic of his style. Now porcelain could be the new frontier, because according to Chan, besides being resistant, it can be colored. The jeweler has told to undergo the charm of the porcelain since he was a child. He was born in a very poor family, where the adults shared a single porcelain spoon, while he and his brothers used one of plastic, shared. One day, Chan wanted to experience the thrill of holding the porcelain spoon, but he dropped it and broke it. An emotion that, he says, was a stimulus to invent super porcelain. Although now the spoons are not lacking him. Giulia Netrese
