Where culture looms large

Houndstooth, checkerboard, colour blocks, diamonds – when Shanghai-based textile designer Hu Minna first saw these patterns during a visit to a remote village in Guizhou province in 2006, she was in awe. She was even more impressed when she was told all these patterns have been emerging from local looms for centuries.
Hu decided to bring the patterns to the public. Hence the Shanghai exhibition “Chinese Cloths: Woven, Dyed, Embroidered”, which shows hundreds of items collected by Hu since 2006. She aims to expose the cloth of China’s traditional crafts, their relationship with nature and their meaning in today’s fast-paced society. It is also a record of hundreds of patterns invented, inherited and inspired throughout the centuries by people around the nation.
All the objects on view are from villages in Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi and around Shanghai. Despite the vast geographical span, the locations sometime offer similar motifs in patterns that reflect migration and cultural mergers over the centuries. However, on second look, visitors can tell the delicate differences between patterns from two neighbouring villages.
“All the cloth on display was actually essential to the local people’s living,” Hu says. “They don’t make these for sale – they make them for wrapping their babies, preparing for girls’ dowries or simply for wearing. And for this reason, every piece is like a clan badge that shows the family’s wisdom and capability.”
A garment from Guizhou is one of the highlights of the exhibition. It adapts batik-painting skills with motifs of nature and the family’s history, with vivid portraits of ancestors, snakes and birds. “For some cloth-makers and their families, a garment is a visual record of an epic that tells how the household is developed,” Hu says.
Some tools, including looms and knives for drafting patterns and waxes for batik, are also displayed, giving visitors insight into the complicated processes.
Unlike the modern fashion industry, traditional cloth-making is time-consuming, but the products last much longer. The patterns and the skills are usually the secrets of a family, handed down from mother to daughter. Traditional cloth-making is demanding and requires a lifetime of training. It might involve dozens of steps and take several months to finish a handkerchief-sized piece.
The folk patterns and traditional cloth-making crafts are precious in terms of their contributions to the database of the textile industry, since they are still inspiring textile designers.
However, because mass-produced clothing is increasingly replacing traditional cloth, some of the patterns and crafts are on the edge of dying out. “I think maybe one of the best ways to preserve the traditional patterns and crafts is to find their positions – or functions they potentially realise – in today’s world,” Hu says.
“For example, making them into smaller-sized products, such as a shoulder bag, purse and name-card holder.”


Woven wonders
The exhibition is in Shanghai at 3F Found Muji, iapm, 999 Huaihai Zhonglu (Middle Road). It continues through April 20.
For details, call (021) 6475 6855.