Jingya Yang - UK/China - Growing Gems Section
Jingya Yang
Designer biography:
Jingya Yang is a jewellery artist based in the UK. She graduated from Birmingham City University in 2025 and is currently based in Birmingham. Coming from a jade carving family, her practice centres on Nephrite jade, exploring how the material can be approached beyond traditional systems of value. Her work focuses on variation, irregularity, and the natural conditions of the material, repositioning jade within a contemporary context.
Collection concept:
Held in Between
In this series, I do not see Nephrite jade as something that needs to be perfected. Instead, I focus on how to work with it. Traditionally, Nephrite jade is often shaped through detailed carving to create complete and defined forms. Instead, I work in a more reductive way, using repeated cutting and polishing to let forms appear gradually, rather than fixing them completely in advance. I am more interested in what already exists within the material. Irregularities, transitions, and shifts become visible through the process, forming what I see as a kind of internal landscape. In my practice, cutting is not only a technique, but also a way of making decisions. Each removal is irreversible, which makes the process slow and deliberate. Many decisions are adjusted through the process, rather than being carried out exactly as initially planned. The works often stay between angular and rounded forms, without being fully resolved. They can be worn, or exist as objects. In some pieces, I introduce more direct interventions, such as carving channels to embed metal into the Nephrite jade. These incisions are both structural and visual; they are not surface decoration, but enter the material itself and establish a relationship with it. These pieces are not meant to replace traditional approaches, but to offer another way of seeing Nephrite jade, one that stays closer to the material itself.
