BR Gallery Introduction

BR Gallery champions highly skilled Chinese artists working with metal. It discovers and supports the country’s best metalsmiths, taking their work to fairs and hosting exhibitions and talks in China and Europe. It also brings the work of British artists to China, encouraging creative dialogues between East and West.

Our artists draw on regional craft-making traditions and modern technologies to create contemporary jewellery and metal objects that hold universal narratives about the past and present. They give the medium a new dynamism, engaging with their materials in unexpected ways.

We offer museum-quality, yet highly wearable works of art for the body and objects to live with on a daily basis. They are made to be touched and held.

Since its inception, BR Gallery has hosted, co-curated or exhibited in over 15  exhibitions, including Collect art fair in London in 2022 and 2023, and the 5th China International Contemporary Metal Art Exhibition in 2021, for which Sally brought the work of leading British metalsmiths to China to encourage a cross-pollination of ideas. Our artists’ works have been collected by international museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, as well as Chinese institutions, such as China Art Museum in Shanghai, the Today Art Museum in Beijing.

After closing its physical space in 2022, BR Gallery has participated in art fairs as a nomadic gallery and collaborated with local galleries to organize exhibitions. BR Gallery is committed to helping metalwork flourish in the country and around the world. Since 2024, BR Gallery has started representing outstanding Japanese artists, making the gallery's roster of artists more international.

BR Gallery’s founder Sally Rui Li’s passion for craft was fuelled during her childhood in Yunnan Province, a region with 26 officially recognised ethnic minority groups. Her father was a mythologist who studied their religions and cultures, often taking her with him to their villages, where she witnessed a diverse array of making traditions.

Sally spent the first part of her career in Beijing, managing international exchange programmes for a university in the UK. It was a trip with a British silversmith to Heqing, a town with a silver-making tradition spanning more than 1,000 years, that compelled her to launch BR Gallery in 2018. “I realised I want to share this knowledge, promote regional cultures and support artists who could bring contemporary energy to Chinese metalwork,” she explains. It is the first gallery to specialise in contemporary metal art in mainland China.

Sally is one of the most important collectors of contemporary metal and jewellery collector in China. Her collection actively participates in academic exhibitions organized by prestigious art institutions and universities in China, and she has been invited multiple times to give academic lectures in both China and the UK. In 2024, she delivered lectures at institutions including the Royal College of Art,, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Goldsmiths’ Centre, the Goldsmiths’ Company, Sheffield Hallam University, as well as universities in China, and also served as a juror for the International Israel Jewellery Biennale. She is a member of the Metal Art Committee of the China Arts and Crafts Association and a member of the Silver Art Working Committee of the China National Arts and Crafts Association.