GEMZ: WET

This book is not an archive, it is a tide. You don’t leaf through it, you wade. Pages splash. Stories stick. You come out damp. GEMZ: WET asks you to stay there – wet, soaking, waiting for the next wave.

Slippery, shimmering, dripping – jewellery does not stay dry. It seeps, soaks, and runs over the edges of our bodies and into imagined worlds where boundaries between flesh, stone, fabric, metal and screen dissolve. GEMZ: WET is a plunge into fluidity, guided by the visionary eye of Artistic Director Min Dai, whose tools – constructed photography and artificial intelligence – conjure dreamscapes where adornment glistens like skin after rain, melting into new forms of being.

This edition was born from the practices of our GEMZ talents, each one tracing fluid lines between intimacy and excess, artifice and nature, digital matter and living touch. Their shared attraction to the otherworldly and the unexpected carried this book forward, pulling jewellery out of its traditional frames and into speculative worlds soaked with desire and possibility.

Here, adornment is no longer fixed to the solid, upright body but spreads, leaks, morphs – adorning beings that might swim, hover, shapeshift. GEMZ: WET offers not just a publication but an immersion: a way of experiencing jewellery that is tactile, visceral, sticky with the promise of futures yet to harden. In a world of speed and acceleration, we choose saturation. Get wet.