After artist Jivan Astfalck dined on chicken, she saved their vertebrae, strung them with fine gold wire and artificial pearls and created a necklace to challenge assumptions about body adornment, writes Wang Jie.Rusty steel, chicken bones, worn-out cloth - they might be rubbish to most people, but at the "Beauty of the Lost" exhibition, the waste becomes jewelry.Nine artists display works including photographs, videos and jewelry. The exhibition is curated by Jiang Jiehong, director of the Chinese Visual Arts Center at the Birmingham (England) Institute of Art and Design."This exhibit sets up a framework to invite artists' personal reflection, reinterpretation and imagination for the things that we have lost," Jiang explains. "It intends to slow down our pace (to allow us) to review the time that we have experienced, and encourages creative visual responses with a variety of media, in particular, contemporary jewelry."The show challenges the conventional assumption that jewelry is simply body adornment. It explores a different role for jewelry that is not necessarily bound to materials, rules or traditions, but is defined through artistic expression and personal conviction.The highlight of the show is a necklace created by Jivan Astfalck in 2004, "Chicken Bones." The London artist collected vertebra bones of three chickens, on which she had dined, then connected them with fine gold wire and artificial pearls, making several strands.The ambivalence between the abandoned and the seductive, beauty and loss, pleasure and melancholia is subtly represented. Profound ideas are expressed in a contemporary way.