Cartier Takes 'Into the Wild' to Hong Kong's Haw Par Mansion

Cartier has taken its animals out of the vitrine. From 31 October to 8 November the maison has turned Haw Par Mansion, the 1935 house on Tai Hang Road, into a five-room immersive exhibition called Into the Wild, and the conceit is simple enough to be bold: the panther, for once, is the guest.

The setting does half the work. Haw Par Mansion is a Grade I historic building built for Aw Boon Haw, the Tiger Balm magnate whose name and fortune are tied to the tiger, and it survives as a rare example of Chinese Renaissance architecture in Hong Kong: turquoise glazed tiles and red columns over a Western plan of porticos, bay windows and fireplaces, with Italian stained glass casting coloured light through the rooms and murals carrying Indian and Burmese motifs.

Into the Wild runs the length of the house. Five rooms gather Cartier pieces, archive material and craft demonstrations, tracing the panther across more than a century, and the opening room does it with stained glass: a tiger-patterned window, then moving images that walk the panther from its first appearance in 1914, as an onyx and diamond pattern on a wristwatch, to Jeanne Toussaint's transformation of it into the maison's emblem in the 1930s.

The centre of the exhibition is a room built around Toussaint herself. She is the reason the panther became a language rather than a motif, and she was the first to imagine two of these animals facing one another: here a panther and a tiger meet across diamond-set dials, the two cats sharing the wildness, elegance and independence she prized.

The historical argument is neatly made. Louis Cartier gave Toussaint a vanity case decorated with a panther flanked by cypresses in 1917. She became creative director in 1933 and imagined the panther in three dimensions, standing on an emerald; by 1948 that idea had become one of the most recognisable jewels of the century, the Duchess of Windsor's brooch, a gold panther draped over a cabochon emerald of more than 116 carats. Two years after Toussaint's appointment, Aw Boon Haw was building his own statement on the hillside at Tai Hang. The exhibition reads the two of them as contemporaries, both breaking rules and leaving something behind.

There is craft in it too, and this is where the exhibition earns its ticket. Cartier sets panther spots the way jewellers set fur: onyx or sapphire cut by hand, each stone shaped individually, then fixed with fine metal wire so the coat reads as spotted rather than patterned. Move one spot and the composition changes, which is why a single panther piece can take more than a year. Cartier also runs one of the few glyptics workshops owned by a major jeweller, where two pieces of fossilised wood become a pair of panthers, and its Maison des Metiers d'Art in Switzerland keeps enamelling and stone-setting alive; enamel, fired repeatedly by hand, is what gives the panther's coat its depth.

The house was lit for the opening on 29 October, with Carina Lau, Jay Fung, Stanley Yau and Gigi Yim among the guests, and Yim performing to open the evening.

Into the Wild runs 31 October to 8 November at Haw Par Mansion, Tai Hang Road, Hong Kong.

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