In Japan, bamboo is a sacred plant. Supple as the wind yet strong as metal, it embodies strength, youth, and longevity.
During her artistic research residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto in 2025, designer Marion Vidal explored bamboo as a creative medium in its own right. She reveals its uniqueness, physical properties, and symbolic significance, while pushing the material toward sculptural expression.
Précieux Bambou marks her first collaboration with the MiniMasterpiece Gallery. Conceived as an archipelago of forms, the collection features eight types of jewelry, each autonomous yet intimately linked, interacting with one another like sculptural knucklebones.
By playing with bamboo, an unexpected material in the world of precious jewelry, Marion invents a new language of forms. She works with its rapid growth, its link between earth and sky, its roughness and contrasts—knots, textures, light and dark, variations in scale—to find a balance between the organic freedom of the material and a precise, deliberately minimalist design.
Once the bamboo has been sculpted with geometric rigor and naturalistic flair, Marion Vidal creates interplay between flat and curved lines, punctuated with flashes of yellow gold. The gold acts as a breath, a discreet rhythm that reveals the poetry of the plant. Like the light that guides the bamboo in its growth, the gold lifts it from the earth and brings it to the body, transforming it into a vibrant and sensual jewel of desire.
Between sculpture and jewelry, the collection extends the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Kaguya-hime, the Princess of Light: an apparition born of matter, pierced by light, revealing the shadow of a Japanese legend.