China
Embroidery is youth, embroidery is life——What Embroidering and Embroidery Are to Me
I was born in 1965, in Zhenhu of Suzhou, a land well known for silk and the art of embroidery, where the latter was practiced by generations of women, and embroidery hoops and frames would be regarded as necessary dowries.
I can still recall the moments in my childhood when my mother was “making a living” – this is how people in Suzhou call embroidering –by the light of a kerosene lamp of paper shade. The little girl splitting threads and threading needles for my Mom was married later with a set of red painted embroidery hoop and frame prepared by my Mom as one of her dowries and has become a granny who have to put on a pair of reading glasses to do needlework. After decades doing embroidery, I have acquired an understanding of the “making a living” that may not be shared by many. To me, embroidering 40 years ago represented a way to promote feminine virtues, 30 years ago a necessary means of livelihood, 20 years ago purely practice of the handcraft, and 10 years ago creation of an artistic media for expressing emotions. Today, I have discovered in the practice life, rhythm of life, and philosophy of being.
Nowadays, I have been increasingly coming to a realization that embroidering is a process of self-cultivation, physically and mentally closely connected with the embroiderer, which has been perfectly exemplified by my mother. Over the years, in her late seventies, she has been demonstrating stitch after stitch what an elegant and leisurely activity embroidering can be, in my studio at Xiuguan Street, with visitors standing outside the window almost every day observing her working on silk pieces. Responding to those who exclaim “but it’s so wearing”, my mother always says, in Suzhou dialect, “Nothing in the world can be more pleasurable than embroidering”. It used to be a luxury that only princesses and gentlewomen could afford to enjoy of toying with embroidery while appreciating melodic Suzhou Pingtan, a performance art of musical storytelling. Whether embroidering is exhausting or not is quite determined by the needleworkers’ moods and attitudes towards the practice. If one sees it as a lifestyle where one may obtain self-refining, one will naturally find in it calm pleasure, instead of a feeling of overwhelming weariness induced by the necessity of the activity for the sake of livelihood. As one of Mom’s catchphrase goes, “We come to cherish our life only after inevitability of death truly dawned on us.” Weariness and anxiety won’t haunt us so long as we can keep our inner peace. When she is stitching, Mom sits upright and breathes in peace, in which way she won’t get tired even after a dozen of undisturbed hours on the silk pieces because she work with her heart and to the rhythm of her being. Infused with her beings, Mom’s artworks seem to be living, breathing and pulsing at ease.
After years of experience in and pondering on embroidering, I become more and more confident of the belief that artworks instilled with the emotions life and beings of people giving their hearts and souls to them can outlive their creators and continue to tell the stories they are supposed to convey. People who have them in their collections, indirectly get hold of the moments and parts of the craftspersons’ lives and beings as well.
