Jade Chia-Yu Tsai was born in Taipei and raised in Japan. Her practice moves across cultural strategy, food writing, opera curation, and a long-standing love of vines. Before these threads became a practice, she walked more than 3,000 kilometers across Europe, slept in garbage trucks, and learned to survive on very little before finding her way into a more elevated kind of wandering. Along the road, she met Lolly the corgi; the two now live in the United States.
As a child, Jade was nearly blind and only regained full vision at the age of 27, after two decades of treatment. That history gave her a rare fluency in how the world can be read through more than one sense. Some of her earlier works explored how music might be tasted and touched, or how air itself might be seen and heard. When that same perception entered the world of business, it became an instinct for sensing where value, collaboration, and real commercial possibility were waiting to be found.
For years, she worked at the intersection of business, the performing arts, and the cultural sector, serving as a bridge between worlds. She helped bring the Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbie Hancock, Bobby McFerrin, and other Grammy Award winners into the Greater China market, translating difficult cultural language into forms that people could actually approach.
She later founded MÖTHEA, a culture and technology consultancy shaped by a theatre-informed approach to strategy, relationship design, and world-making. The name comes from “Mobility” and “Theatre,” grounded in her belief that theatre has already walked out of the theatre: people are participants in the world, and the forms of life they gather into become culture. Consumer technology is one of the stages we encounter every day.
Alongside her business work, Jade created Women and The Table They Set, a project exploring European female identity and cultural revolution through the dining table, which was shortlisted for the World Food Photography Awards. She later collaborated on True Colors of Yosifu: A Journey in Artistic Expression, a National Golden Tripod Award-winning book shaped by her reflections on colour, politics, and power.
She has been invited to speak by institutions including the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei and has served as a guest lecturer in the Master’s Program in Economics at National Taiwan University.
Audemars Piguet invited Jade to interpret the Royal Oak through a reflection on time. When she first encountered the world clocks in an airport—Chicago entering evening, Japan waking into morning, and Taipei moving into night—she realised that time is both a shared “now” and a scene co-created by place, movement, and the rhythms of daily life. For her, time is geographical: a sense of the world born from movement.
The Royal Oak, then, was never simply a marker of status. In an era captivated by the radiance of gold, it chose steel to forge its own staircase—not as a climb away from the world, but as an invitation to return to it: to move through daily life with quiet confidence, and to reshape it through understated power.
Before moving to the United States, Jade was named one of Tatler Asia’s Front & Female, among women recognised for turning initiative into possibility for others. It was not an arrival, but a departure.