Yuyi Cheng

The Stand That Stopped Me

I met Yuyi Cheng at an exhibition in Cutlers’ Hall, Sheffield. The hall was full of jewellers, stand after stand of good work, and I was browsing my way along when one stand stopped me in my tracks. The pieces looked different - beautiful, ornate, unlike anything else in the room. I went over and said the enamel was stunning, that deep blue with the gold around it. She smiled and said, guess what, that’s not enamel - that’s feathers. That single sentence is the reason this page exists.

She works in London, so we found a date and I drove down to her house, which has a studio at the back. It was the hottest day of the English year; she had a cold drink waiting and a table of her work laid out for me to look at. Warm, funny, completely unguarded - and quietly doing something almost nobody else in the country does.

What Looks Like Enamel

The technique is called dian cui - literally “dotting with kingfisher” - and it is ancient. Tiny sections of iridescent feather are cut to shape and laid by hand into cells of fine metalwork, giving a blue so even and so deep that the eye reads it as enamel. For centuries it was jewellery only the imperial court could afford, the blue taken from the kingfisher. The kingfisher is now protected, so Yuyi uses feathers naturally moulted by parrots instead - the look of the old work, without its cost to the bird.

Her Soaring Phoenix brooch won a Bronze Award at the Goldsmiths’ Craft & Design competition, and it carries the whole tradition in one piece. The phoenix was the emblem of the empress; the body is filigree and feather; surviving pieces of this kind sit in museums now, the British Museum among them. Yuyi has made it wearable again, and made it new.

She showed me the books she works from - antique headdresses and ornaments, page after page of imperial blue - and the album where she grades and stores the feathers, cut and sorted by colour from yellow through to that signature blue.

Across the table were the results: rose-gold filigree studs, a feather hairpin, the little silver cups, a mother-of-pearl bow. Every piece is the same idea worked a different way - an old imperial method turned to something you could wear to work.

Wire Drawn Fine as Thread

Under all of it is the wirework itself: filigree - hua si, in Chinese - the openwork frame the feather and the stone are set into. A length of silver is drawn through a steel plate, hole by smaller hole, until it is as fine as thread. Then it is coiled, twisted, laid into a pattern and soldered, join by tiny join, into open lacework that somehow holds its shape. A single small piece can be hundreds of separate solderings. I watched her build a domed openwork sphere out of wire and could not, even up close, see where one scroll ended and the next began.

Held up to the light, the finished wirework reads like lace - and it is silver, rigid, and made one filament at a time.

Taiwan to London

I asked her how she had come to it, and recorded the answer. She grew up in Taiwan and trained there first as a fine artist, taking a fine-art degree in metalwork at Tunghai University. She came to London for the BA (Hons) Fashion Jewellery course at London College of Fashion, where she took her degree, and somewhere in it the jewellery became the part she could not stop thinking about. She also trained as a floral artist, with McQueen Flowers in London - which is why, she says, so much of her work comes back to leaves and blossom and fabric textures. That was the turn she described: she put some money together, bought a few tools, and began.

It escalated quickly. She trained at Bishopsland, the silversmithing trust, and the awards started coming - two Goldsmiths’ Craft & Design Bronze awards, and the Jacobs emerging-designer prize in 2022, won on public vote. One of those Goldsmiths’ wins, the Phoenix, did more than sit on the wall: the Worshipful Company of Gold and Silver Wyre Drawers, a centuries-old London livery company, sponsors that competition, and the piece first brought her to their attention. In April 2026 they admitted her a Freeman of the Company, and with it a Freeman of the City of London - two certificates among the framed awards above her bench, a quiet record of where the work has carried her.

From there, she said, came commissions and a steady run of online sales, her pieces going out to buyers across the world and a good many to America. For the last few years this is what she has done, and what I had come to see: ancient techniques, modern jewellery, made by hand in a London back room.

The Studio at the Back

The studio is exactly what a working jeweller’s room should be. Benches and drawers down one side, equipment and chemicals down the other: a hand-cranked rolling mill by the window, a torch, a laser spot welder she uses for repairs and general jewellery work, a plating unit, an ultrasonic cleaner, a wall of jars - and the daylight lamp she works under, with a reference book of the old work open somewhere nearby.

By Hand

Every piece starts on paper. She draws the shape - a monstera leaf, here - cuts the template, then builds it up in wire before any feather goes near it. Then the slow work: filing, fitting, setting, soldering. She is plain about this when I ask: the filigree is made entirely by hand, every wire positioned and joined by eye, with no microscope and no machine to help. Just the daylight lamp, a steady hand, and the patience to finish it.

The Record

I recorded our whole conversation - and laughed through most of it; she is wonderful company. But underneath the warmth is something the archive exists to find: a person carrying techniques that were nearly lost, refusing to let them stay in a museum case. Dian cui and hua si are endangered crafts. Yuyi learned them, brought them to London, and turned them toward leaves and blossom and birds that a modern hand would want to wear.

What the archive holds now is one hot morning, one set of frames, and the account of a maker who is keeping an ancient art alive by making it new. When she stops, that knowledge does not simply pass on by itself - so it is worth writing down that, right now, in a back room in London, it is being practised, and beautifully.