Stitching a Song-Dynasty Skull to Venice
Craft · Su embroidery
In 2017 Suzhou embroidery entered the Venice Biennale for the first time. The work that drew the crowd was made with stitches the trade had already abandoned.
In May 2017 the 57th Venice Biennale opened its China Pavilion under the title Continuum. Thirty-four pieces of Su embroidery hung inside — the first time Chinese embroidery had been shown at the Biennale at all. The series that stopped people was stitched from a Song-dynasty painting, Li Song's Skeleton Puppet Show: a skeletal pedlar working a puppet that is also a skeleton, a woman nursing an infant beside him. Eight hundred years on, nobody has settled what the painting means.
To make it, Yao Huifen went back to the oldest stitches in the trade. Flat stitch had long since been replaced by random stitch and by the void-and-solid variants; plenty of embroiderers had stopped using it altogether. She did the opposite. She put dozens of the old stitches onto one painting, and set them against each other.
IThree or four stitches would do
Yao Huifen is a national-level inheritor of Su embroidery, a native of Suzhou, born into an embroidering family. She started at ten.
The usual method, she says, is economical. Two stitches, three, four — that is enough to carry a traditional pattern.
“For a traditional design we might use three or four kinds of stitch, sometimes only two or three, and the piece holds up. This series, Skeleton Puppet Show, is nothing like that.”
Yao Huifen
The series runs to nine panels and uses close to fifty stitches. Not divided up — each stitch made to speak for itself in one small area.
One thing should be said plainly: seven of those nine panels were designed by the contemporary artist Wu Jian'an. She and her team of embroiderers did the stitching. Someone else's drawing; her needle.
“Every part has a different stitch from the part next to it, and it has to be full of opposition and contradiction.”
Yao Huifen
Skill alone does not get you there. She says that during those months, “there were times when I genuinely did not know where to start.”
IIStanding in front of it
The day the panels went up, her own work frightened her.
“I had never imagined that standing in front of this series, there would be this much force, this much tension.”
Yao Huifen
Visitors came up and touched her hands. Some of them hugged her. She says she was moved, and does not dress it up further.
She treats those months as a demonstration rather than an achievement: Su embroidery can be made with artists from other fields, and what comes out of that will look nothing like the tradition — and will reach people younger than the ones who usually buy it.
IIIThe age of the embroiderers
The noise was in the pavilion. Back in Zhenhu, outside Suzhou, the harder figure is this: the women who embroider are mostly between forty and fifty-five.
“Slowly you get a gap — the young ones are not coming through.”
Yao Huifen
The groundwork of the craft is matching colour and splitting thread. A single silk thread is twisted from two strands; one strand splits into eight filaments, and each filament into eight again — one hundred and twenty-eight parts at the finest. To stitch a hill ten centimetres high you pick a dozen shades from the same family. Few young people now want to spend years acquiring that eye and that fingertip.
Her answer is to teach anyone who asks. She lectures at Soochow University and she teaches in primary schools. Every year people travel from all over the country to learn, and she turns none of them away.
“It may only ever be a hobby for them. But I always feel that in teaching them I am planting one seed of Su embroidery somewhere inside them.”
Yao Huifen
IVTwo masters
Her foundation came from two people. One was Mou Zhihong, third-generation heir of Shen Shou's simulated embroidery. The other was Ren Huixian, who devised the void-and-solid random stitch.
“So you could say I took two masters.”
Yao Huifen
The line runs back a long way: Shen Shou, Jin Jingfen, Mou Zhihong on one side; Yang Shouyu, Ren Huixian on the other. At twenty-two she went into the city with her younger sister Yao Huiqin to apprentice, renting a room under ten square metres. They were up before daylight to stitch, carried the work to the teacher's house in the evening for correction, and used the gaps to study drawing. That lasted three years.
In 1998 the sisters came back to Zhenhu and put their own names over a door: Qinfen Embroidery Studio, shop in front, workshop behind. It changed what embroidery was locally — a sideline for farming families became a job, with hours and a wage. The model was copied down the whole embroidery street.
Later she spent ten years developing what she calls simple stitch: Western drawing lines brought into silk, the fewest stitches and the plainest colours that will hold a face. She took a national patent on it in 2015.
Living Tradition · Su Embroidery
Suzhou Double-Sided Silk Embroidery Tabletop Display
Pure silk threads split fine as gossamer, stitched with flawless imagery on both faces and not a single visible knot. An authentic double-sided Zhenhu piece for the desk.
VA seed
Zhenhu has a population of just over twenty thousand, eight thousand of them embroiderers, and four hundred studios; another five thousand people work in the trades around them. That density built Su embroidery as it is today, and it is also what presses on tomorrow. The embroiderers are ageing. The ones learning are not keeping up. She is building an embroidery college to change that.
She is unmoved by her own honours.
“Behind all of these halos, for me it is a responsibility — and more than that, a wish.”
Yao Huifen
A double-sided panel like this one hides no knots on either face; front and back are both pictures. It is the hardest branch of the craft, and the easiest to walk past as decoration. There are more pieces off the frame along this shelf.
A craft survives a thousand years not because one masterpiece reached one pavilion. It survives because somebody is still willing to sit down and split a thread into a hundred and twenty-eight parts.
