Coming to Shing Lee’s studio in Wessex Estate, the city begins to loosen its grip. Roads shake off their straight lines–the drive eases into bends, climbs and dips as it takes you inward. The black and white building I am looking for is on Woking Road. On the map this road draws a loose, looping pattern that reminds me of Shing’s link pieces. This is of course just a coincidence. But it is a nice idea.

To reach the studio on the second floor, I pass a frontage of palms, spider lilies, heliconias, and an old banyan. They make a small pocket of forest–together, remarkably, their shade, scent, and sound give immediate relief from the harsh afternoon. There is a construction site just beyond the estate–cranes visible, piling audible–but all this noise and activity come reaching here much gentled by the distance and the green. It is still Singapore. But it feels like somewhere else.

“I’ve lived here for 13 years,” Shing tells me, as she shows me around her workstations from the jeweller’s table to the draw bench. Trained at Central Saint Martins, Shing works with silver–an old material and an old craft–with a distinctive avant-garde sensibility. She calls her work bodily adornments rather than jewellery. Her pieces often propose alternatives to traditions and conventions. She also leaves the wearing open, giving the owner personal options on where and how a piece sits on the body.

As she shows me her 2025 collection Bling is Dead, assembled from jewelry and jewelry parts–components such as clasps, hooks, bails, empty settings, and upside-down stones combine unexpectedly into what she calls “a protest against fine jewellery”—it is striking how much radical thinking this quiet studio contains. An alternative world, producing works proposing an alternative world.

The pace here is its own kind of alternative too. Shing puts out a main seasonal collection each year alongside a permanent line of everyday pieces, released as and when they are ready. “The pace of work is slow. And there is no strict timetable for it,” she says. She doesn't follow the industry’s rhythm, even if her pieces are stocked at Dover Street Market.

“I find the fashion calendar too hectic for me.” This year–her thirty-first since founding her label Argentum–she is reaching back into her archive. There will be reissues, to be released piece by piece through the year, as well as a year-end collection to be announced. There are also custom commissions, which come with their own demands. Work can get busy but Shing, characteristically, stays unhurried. Where does the steadiness come from?

“This paradise helps,” she says, gesturing to the green outside. She walks the estate, does yoga, and makes it a point to find quiet time alone every day–the recent arrival of two curious kittens notwithstanding. But it turns out that the spaciousness–the room required for creative patience and independence–is not really out here, generous as this place is.

“I actually have another land,” Shing says. “It's in my mind. It's a mindscape, it's not a landscape. When the mind is at equilibrium, it's a very calm scene. That is my another land.”

Discover more of Argentum here

_______________________

 Yvonne Xu is a strategic writer working across design and culture. She is the author of shuǐ and mù, and a contributing writer to Monocle.