Famed guxiu, or Gu-style embroidery, is named after the artistic
concubine of Shanghai scholar Gu Huihai. Ladies integrated painting
and embroidery and turned an elite women's pastime into a family
industry in hard times.
Needlecraft belongs to a bygone era when Chinese gentlewomen
didn't work. "Stitch after stitch" - and exquisite stitches many of
them were - was a favorite way to pass the time.
More than that, for cultivated women, embroidery was a vehicle
for expressing their innermost feelings and views of nature and
human relations.
"Fancy Art of Shanghai, Selected Works of Gu-style Embroidery,"
an exhibition of 50 embroidery pieces, is underway at the Shanghai
Museum. It is the first special show devoted to guxiu that
originated in Shanghai's Songjiang District in the Lu Xiang
Garden.
Guxiu is named after the exquisite needlework of a concubine of
Gu Huihai, the eldest son of a famous scholar in Shanghai in the
late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). But its greatest practitioner was
Han Ximin, wife of the second grandson of the family. She was known
as "Saint Needle."
She and other women in the 17th-century family created
"paintings" in silk, sometimes copying classic painting and
calligraphy, even down to replicating the seal.
The embroidery used subtly dyed silk threads and wool, and
sometimes human hair, swallows' feathers, animal down, aquatic
grasses and threads or flakes of gold. They were coveted luxury
items.
Originally Gu-style embroidery was a kind of "boudoir art" only
appreciated and collected by literati, but it later became a fne
art product that was sold due to the Gu family's failing financial
situation.
"Because of its rarity, guxiu is not so widely known," says Chen
Xiejun, director of Shanghai Museum. "It is the first time that a
special show featuring Gu-style embroidery has ever been held."
Some of the embroidery is on loan from Beijing's Palace Museum,
the Liaoning Provincial Museum, the Nanjing Museum, Nantong Museum
and Suzhou Museum, all in Jiangsu Province. This is the first time
some pieces have been publicly viewed.
Embroidery was one of the four domestic virtues that women were
required to have in ancient China (the others were cooking, sewing
and knitting). Women often poured their innermost subtle feelings
into this craft, and so many works carry a feeling of truth.
Their understanding of flora and fauna, their love of family,
affection, friendship and even religion were expressed.
Listed as one of China's intangible cultural heritages, Gu-style
embroidery achieved its refined technique through accurate
observations fused with inspirations from the literati's
paintings.
"What made Gu-style embroidery excel over others was the
embroiderers' aesthetic acuity and art perception," adds Chen. "The
cultural ethos and elegant taste nurtured by a good education from
a wealthy family, plus mastery of sewing skills has made Gu-style
embroidery an art that every visitor will marvel at."
The show is divided into four parts: copies of classical works,
Taoism and Buddhism, flora and fauna, as well as narrative
themes.
One remarkable characteristic of the embroidery is its various
stitches. For example, concentric long and short stitches were used
on flowers; straight long and short ones on rockery. Sometimes the
embroidery integrated "encroaching" stitches to create the texture
of an overlapped effect. "Gu-style embroidery is a perfect
combination of embroidery and painting," says Chen.
The inspiration of the work was often a famous classical
painting or calligraphy. Gu-style embroidery follows exactly the
classical form of a painting, with four required elements: poetry,
calligraphy, painting and a seal.
The tiny needles and threads make the whole work so smooth that
it looks like a real painting. The tiny spaces between two groups
of stitches are so accurate that they appear to be painted
lines.
Due to the technique, tone and texture of silk materials, the
embroidery has a feminine and soft flavor that even the original
painting could not render.
The colors in the embroidery are close to the original hues. "It
is probable the Gu-style ladies mastered a secret recipe for dying
thread," says Ma Baojie, director of the Liaoning Provincial
Museum. "The colorful threads dyed in various shades provided a
prerequisite for Gu-style embroidery to mimetically represent its
painting prototype. In fact, dying silk threads was more difficult
than dying silk textiles."
The Gu family ladies were also adept at twisting different
colored threads into a thicker strand to create a visual effect of
a new color or a unique texture.
Gu-style embroidery equates needles with the artist's brushes
and silk threads with color pigments.
Standing in front of these embroidery artworks, one can imagine
a lady sitting quietly, indulged in a small world of needles and
threads.
Date: through February 25, 9am-5pm
Address: 201 People's Ave
Admission: 20 yuan
Tel: 8621-6372-3500
(Shanghai Daily January 4, 2008)