FOR FOUR days in Seoul’s Bukchon district, L’ÉCOLE School of Jewelry Arts, the jewellery school patronised exclusively by Van Cleef & Arpels, made the case that learning to read a diamond and learning to read a city might not be such different exercises.

The occasion marked the Nomadic School’s first ever stop in Korea: three weeks of courses, talks and an exhibition called Garden of Emeralds, running from 25 June to 15 July inside Futura Seoul, an exposed-concrete gallery in Bukchon’s historic hanok village. L’ÉCOLE School of Jewelry Arts has run permanent campuses in Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Dubai since 2012, funded solely by Van Cleef & Arpels, with its mission being the transmission of jewellery as a cultural practice and technical art, one that humanity shares in uniquely and expresses in equally unique measure through the prism of various cultures. This year that meant 102 courses in Seoul alone, open to complete beginners and specialists alike.

Why did Van Cleef & Arpels choose Futura, set into a neighbourhood of Joseon-era tiled roofs with its industrial, concrete-boned facade, as its venue? “Because of its positioning in Seoul, because of its geographical also location in terms of being in a historical district at the heart of the city and in a contemporary setting,” L’ÉCOLE School of Jewelry Arts president Lise Macdonald told me of the venue. “We thought it was the right location and also the right time to be here.” Jewellery, for Macdonald, carries the same weight as the building housing it. “Jewellery is an expression of humanity,” she said. “It is not a subcategory of decorative arts. Jewellery is, like any other type of artistic expression, a true creation and artistic value.”

Julie Clody-Medina, Van Cleef & Arpels’ President of Asia Pacific, kept returning to one word when we spoke: transmission. “The original and primary mission of L’École is really to open the door of the jewellery arts through hands-on experiences, classes, courses, talks, workshop, exhibition, to demystify all the know-how behind the jewellery creation,” she said. Understanding how a piece is made, she argued, changes what a buyer sees in it. “It’s a whole universe behind a single creation.”

One such workshop, “The Diamond: A Gemological Exception,” taught across two hours on Futura’s skylit second floor, became as much a history lesson as a scientific one. Participants learnt about the extreme conditions required to create a diamond, with the Lesotho Legend as a case study: a 910-carat rough stone pulled from Lesotho’s Letšeng mine in 2018, the fifth-largest gem-quality diamond ever found, later cut into 67 stones for Van Cleef & Arpels’ Legend of Diamonds collection. 

The next station was to sit with artisans and watch the dexterity and delicate labour that goes into the jeweller’s art, shaping metal into miniature sculpture by hand. The jewel in this particular crown, though, was downstairs, inside Garden of Emeralds, which paired traditional Korean landscape painting with video projections commissioned for the show, built around the inclusions found inside the stones themselves.

The same exactness was replicated at lunch on the second day, when we sat down at the bar at award-winning restaurant On6.5, a Bukchon restaurant built entirely around one idea: kimchi ferments best at exactly 6.5 degrees. The menu, fried kimchi with dongchimi sour cream, a barley risotto topped with seaweed-wrapped pork, is engineered to hold that number. 

A culture that appreciates the value in naming a restaurant after a temperature is a culture understands what Clody-Medina meant by a whole universe behind a single creation, whether the object in question is a brooch or a bowl.  

Evenings ran further out from Bukchon. One dinner was VINHO in Gangnam, Michelin-starred, chef Jeon Seong-bin folding Korean tradition into modern technique, a yellowtail tartare finished with katsuobushi cream. Another was Samwon Garden, a Hanwoo galbi institution running since 1976, its yangnyeom galbi grilled over charcoal beside a courtyard waterfall. 

The idea of a nomadic school is itself a philosophical one. By nature, schools are sites of exchange and learning between those who attend. To be nomadic is to open it up even further, to bring in influence and eyes from further afield and experience that shift in context that can only come from travel.

It’s something that expands the experience not just for those visiting, but for those who, for a brief time, are local to L’ECOLE School of Jewelry Arts. 

“I would be very keen to see how the local audience respond to the intersection of cultures we’ve tried to create for this Nomadic School everywhere we take it,” says Macdonald.

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