Book Introduction
A red thread can be a structure, a symbol, or a path connecting the body, materials, and culture. Red X Thread: Franz Bette – Jewellery focuses on the work of German contemporary jewellery artist Franz Bette and documents how his long engagement with Asian cultures led him to reconsider the relationships among metal, fibre, porcelain, bamboo, wood, and paper. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at ALIEN Art Centre in Kaohsiung, the book is not only an artist monograph, but also an important study of cross-cultural exchange, contemporary jewellery, and spatial expression.
Franz Bette has long been associated with Germany’s author jewellery and contemporary jewellery movements. His earlier works often used steel, silver, gold, and metal wire to construct precise and rational geometric forms. Möbius strips, crosses, circles, spirals, and net-like structures recur throughout his practice. After years of teaching, travelling, and working in Asia, however, he began introducing porcelain, paper cord, bamboo, wood, and fibre—materials that are softer, more fragile, and more visibly marked by time. As a result, his previously industrial visual language gradually became more organic and open, approaching the qualities of drawing and poetry in space.
The title Red X Thread refers to more than the physical presence of red cord. In these works, thread functions as both a practical means of joining materials and a symbol of the relationships among cultures, memories, and ideas. It may pass through transparent surfaces, loosely connect fragments of porcelain, wood, and metal, or extend into the surrounding space through an unfinished end. Red carries multiple associations across cultures, including good fortune, vitality, passion, power, and danger. Rather than fixing the colour to a single interpretation, Bette leaves viewers free to read these lines and symbols through their own experiences.
The works also challenge the traditional valuation of jewellery through precious materials and refined decoration. For Bette, the meaning of jewellery does not reside solely in the object itself, but unfolds through the wearer’s body, movement, clothing, and surrounding space. Soft paper cord and fibre, rigid metal, fragile porcelain, and organic bamboo and wood are brought together to create tensions between lightness and weight, permanence and transience, precision and chance. In this way, the works move fluidly between jewellery, sculpture, drawing, and body art.
Presented in English, German, and Traditional Chinese, *Red X Thread* features brooches, rings, body jewellery, and mixed-media works from different periods of the artist’s career. Clear and carefully composed photographs reveal how lines move through space, how materials suspend and support one another, and how jewellery acquires new meaning in relation to the scale of the body. The book is especially suited to contemporary jewellery and metalwork artists, jewellery design students, fibre and ceramic artists, curators, craft collectors, and readers interested in material culture and cross-cultural artistic practice.
The true significance of Red X Thread lies in the fact that it does not remain at the level of superficial Eastern imagery. Instead, it shows how materials themselves can transform an artist’s way of thinking. From metal wire to red fibre, and from precise geometry to organic, fragile, and fluid structures, an apparently simple thread becomes an open route between East and West, tradition and the contemporary, body and space, and jewellery and art.
Details
Author: Sabine Runde, Yaman Shao
Publisher: Arnoldsche Art Publishers
Publication Year: 2019
Size: 31×22 cm
Binding: Softcover
Pages: 96 pages
