Hong Kong jewellery label MIDNIGHTFACTORY and its founder and designer, Auston Tse, were featured in an interview with INNER, exploring how memories and emotions are translated into jewellery and how the brand has developed its own language across design, gender and personal expression.
Published in 2023, the INNER interview looks at MIDNIGHTFACTORY through the idea of storytelling and traces Auston’s journey in finding jewellery as the brand’s primary creative medium.
For Auston, MIDNIGHTFACTORY has always been a space for holding ideas, emotions and personal experiences. While the form of the brand has evolved over time, its central question has remained remarkably consistent: how can something difficult to put into words be transformed into an object that can be seen, worn and kept?
A Space for Ideas and Emotions
In his conversation with INNER, Auston describes MIDNIGHTFACTORY as a space that allows him to retain creative freedom.
Rather than explaining every idea directly, the brand often leaves clues across its jewellery, imagery, writing and visual details, allowing the wearer to discover, interpret and ultimately give each piece a meaning of their own.
This open-ended way of communicating has gradually become part of MIDNIGHTFACTORY’s design language.
Jewellery does not need to offer a single answer. It can simply be an object someone is drawn to, or over time become connected to a relationship, a memory or an emotion understood only by the person wearing it.
Translating Emotion into Jewellery
The interview also looks back at the period when Auston began shifting the creative focus of MIDNIGHTFACTORY towards jewellery.
In 2021, during a period marked by uncertainty and emotional difficulty, he began using design as a way to process feelings that were difficult to articulate. Jewellery gradually became the medium that felt most natural for carrying those ideas.
Rather than directly retelling an experience, design allowed an emotion to take on another form.
It could be transformed, reconsidered and eventually become something tangible that could remain close to the body.
This idea of jewellery as a vessel for memory and emotion would go on to shape MIDNIGHTFACTORY’s creative direction.
My Last Memory Of Home
INNER highlights MIDNIGHTFACTORY Chapter 01, “My Last Memory Of Home.”
The collection began with the idea of fire and the imagined experience of losing a home, exploring what remains after trauma and how we live with marks that cannot simply disappear.
Rather than treating damage as something that needs to be erased, MIDNIGHTFACTORY became interested in what those traces could represent: an object may be changed by what it has experienced and still continue to exist, with its marks becoming part of its story.
This exploration of vulnerability, scars and resilience would continue to surface throughout later MIDNIGHTFACTORY collections.
Burnt Pearls and Imperfection
One of the defining pieces from Chapter 01 is Burnt Pearls.
The design introduces surfaces that resemble burn marks across the pearls, deliberately challenging traditional associations of pearls with smoothness, delicacy and flawless perfection.
For MIDNIGHTFACTORY, imperfection does not necessarily need to be hidden.
What an object has experienced, and the traces those experiences leave behind, can become part of what gives it character.
Burnt Pearls became an early expression of an idea that continues through the brand: beauty does not exist only in things that remain untouched.
Genderless Jewellery
The INNER interview also explores the relationship between jewellery and gender.
For Auston, jewellery does not need to be strictly divided into menswear or womenswear. As the boundaries around clothing, styling and self-expression continue to become more fluid, jewellery can naturally exist across a much wider spectrum.
MIDNIGHTFACTORY therefore does not begin its design process from conventional gender categories.
What matters more is how someone chooses a piece, how they style it and what part of themselves they choose to express through it.
Jewellery may not be a necessity, but it can become an intimate and direct form of personal language.
Finding a Place Between Design and Everyday Wear
Auston also reflects on the ongoing experimentation involved in building MIDNIGHTFACTORY.
Creative work is not only about self-expression. It also involves understanding how an idea can become an object that people genuinely choose to wear, live with and purchase, while allowing the brand itself to continue growing.
Finding a balance between concept and commerciality has therefore always been part of MIDNIGHTFACTORY’s development.
As jewellery became the brand’s primary medium, Auston gradually found an approach that felt more natural: retaining emotion, storytelling and design ideas while translating them into objects that can become part of everyday life.
That process of experimentation and evolution remains part of MIDNIGHTFACTORY today.
About MIDNIGHTFACTORY
MIDNIGHTFACTORY is an independent jewellery label founded in Hong Kong in 2021 by designer Auston Tse. Working primarily with 925 sterling silver, the brand creates contemporary jewellery through a dark romantic design language that connects personal narratives, emotion and everyday wearability.
MIDNIGHTFACTORY sees jewellery as more than decoration: an object can gather meaning over time and carry memories, relationships and the things we choose to keep close.