How this 26-year-old entrepreneur and art collector is supporting young artists
Clad in a navy suit paired with a white T-shirt and matching sneakers, Lorin Gu looks every bit the millennial entrepreneur. His boyish skilful looks is a sharp contrast to the urban industrial surrounds of our shoot location, a erstwhile transport repairs factory on 2 Cavan Road, which was transformed into a pop-up art destination, Twenty Twenty, by the Singapore Arts Club in January.
SINGAPORE TATLER> Gallerist Audrey Yeo transforms this former transport repairs workshop and warehouse into a pop-upwards art destination
The camera loves Gu – the 26-year-old is the founder of Recharge Capital, a growth and private equity investment fund headquartered in Hong Kong and operating in Beijing, New York and Singapore – and so does our fine art director, who extols the way his confront catches the light oh and so naturally.
Perhaps this innate ability, along with the painting he is pictured with featuring a lone figure with striking turquoise hair by British artist Lisa Wright, and the diamond-encrusted Cartier Rotonde de Cartier timepiece on his wrist – both from his own collection – provide reference points for our ensuing chat about his passions: Jewellery and art.
Both passions form the footing of his non-profit Recharge Foundation, which he founded in 2022 to promote the cross-cultural preservation and chat of visual and bejewelled arts. Besides building his family's interdisciplinary drove of art, antiques and jewellery, Gu is offering grants to support artisans who are turning traditional craftsmanship on its head – just the kind of disruption that one has come up to expect of his generation.
Growing upward, Gu would oft follow his mother to jewellery boutiques and workshops around the world. He later became interested in the idea of what jewellery means to people of different times and societies.
"Jewellery is probably ane of the oldest forms of cultural narration – from an indication of men's ability to women's trophy status to women's independence and ambition today," he expounded. "This corresponds to the theme of the Recharge Foundation's collection, which explores cultural narration and value evolution. We look at the convergence and departure of values, customs and materialism in the world."
Covering a fourth dimension period from 1905 to the nowadays, the drove explores three main threads: Race and ethnicity, female and minority empowerment, and the rise and demise of consumerism.
Co-ordinate to Gu, "The narrative, cultural and artful merits of jewellery are often disregarded because people couldn't quite fathom the rich history and stories behind them. Fine art serves as about an easier medium to bring out the story in the jewellery pieces, especially when you pair them together."
The foundation currently has over 400 jewellery pieces, from large names such as Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Graff, to no-proper noun designers lost in the 1940s and 50s, whose creations were found at shows, auctions and boutiques, and acquired as part of the collection. While jewellery was the starting point, the art was collected almost simultaneously, and there are now over 450 works.
Gu offered connoisseurs in Singapore a look at this unique juxtaposition between jewellery and fine art at Twenty Twenty, with the HumanMakes: Treasures in the Crude exhibition.
He personally selected artworks past gimmicky artists such as Wright, Canadian painter Anna Weyant and American sculptor Genesis Belanger, and showcased them alongside a 1966 vintage jewellery piece past Harry Winston. The Recharge Foundation also presented workshops by local artists and makers showcasing diverse creative expressions such as hand-weaving.
The foundation get-go launched the HumanMakes program during the Frieze New York art fair last May with a cross-disciplinary exhibition of Chinese art, looking at contemporary interpretations of aboriginal techniques such as feather marquetry, alongside Graff loftier jewellery pieces.
"The HumanMakes programme is really about encouraging young artists who have taken pride in their own local traditional techniques and are modernising them to be new forms of artistic expressions," enthused Gu.
"We attempt to find ways to give the artists not just exhibition opportunities, but also commercialisation opportunities to create pieces in collaboration with big brands to get them exposed to a greater audience," he explained.
At that place are two upcoming exhibitions with French jewellers Cartier and Chaumet. "It volition exist a collaborative projection. With the Chaumet exhibition, for instance, nosotros're creating special-edition jewellery boxes to incorporate jewellery. It'due south a very interesting yet subtle mode of pushing this curiosity to the audience, and the jewellery brands also realise the need for elevating themselves beyond being just a consumer product."
Heart ON SINGAPORE
The HumanMakes exhibition at Twenty Twenty is merely the get-go of the Recharge Foundation's strategic partnership with the Singapore Arts Club, which is helmed by gallerist Audrey Yeo, to invigorate the local arts scene. They promise to bring together artists and artisans from around the globe to create a synergistic experience for both local and international audiences to feel something that is not traditionally proposed by brands, galleries and museums.
Meanwhile, Gu is currently looking for a permanent abode for the foundation in Singapore that will serve as a museum and a hub to influence the Southeast Asian region in terms of craft. There are plans to showcase its permanent collection, and with infinite dedicated to curatorial programmes and special exhibitions featuring local and international artists. The Recharge Foundation currently has a museum in Beijing, with plans to open one in New York in 2022.
For all that he is doing to bring new perspectives to craftsmanship, Gu himself is walking the talk with PlanetBeyond, a tech-enabled accessories and jewellery line crafted from reclaimed metals, including those from discarded mobile phones. Its first jewellery-inspired earbuds was launched last December.
"PlanetBeyond is a manner of expressing my dearest of jewellery design – non everything has to be about high jewellery," said Gu, a Harvard graduate with degrees in practical mathematics and arts history.
"What I plant interesting is how people have been talking about sustainability from purely a marketing or material perspective, but nobody has really idea about sustainability from an operational perspective. I came across this old factory in Mainland china that was making pagers back in the 90s, and considering it's such a small-scale mill, information technology didn't really grab up with the technological progress and was quickly rendered redundant. Then I thought, why not have this opportunity to create something that's new and futuristic, and has no trace of how dated the manufacturing plant is. I actually enjoyed the ironic dissimilarity of it."
Clearly, Gu is the paradigm of a Renaissance man, one who has his eye on the time to come, but his heart firmly in the by.
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/access/lorin-gu-millennial-entrepreneur-art-collector-193356
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