Xu Jiang

President of China Academy of Art

Originality adhere to A Beginner's Mind

A thread crossing mother’s or grandmother’s gentle finger, as the thread passing through the eye of a need, the behavior of weaving is soft but firm, swift and everlasting. This is probably the deepest memory of many people. The memory ties up with the heart which refreshing mind and carrying affection.
Fiber art is such a keen feeling and yearning. Half of it is inside of us so as to let ourselves always feel it. Weaving is the interlacing of fibrous things together. Weaving is a kind of craft by fingers which not only has the characteristic of feminine tenderness and gentleness but also has patterns of ethnic groups and regions as well as simple creation of craft. There are a number of bamboo mat impression patterns of unearthed potteries in the site of China’s Neolithic Age. The bamboo weaving unearthed in Qianshanyang, Huzhou, Zhejiang province is even more amazing. Grass and trees weave our hearts. The history of China is a history of weaving grass and trees. The Chinese character weaving (“Zhi” 织) is component of radical “Xi” (“糸”) and pronounce “Zhi” ( 戠). It is meant to weave the pattern of design into cloth as a fabric. In conclusion, the behavior of weaving is quite like painting pictures and making clothes to contain the warmness. It weaves amiable and visible dress as the development of civilization.
The other part of fiber art is infinite: from the fabrication of tiles and walls to the weaving of city streets, from the traditional philosophy as fabric to the endless digital media, it spreads a big net to the world to cover everything. Here, weaving become a kind of general view and discrimination of vision as bee-eye. This kind of vision let us harvest a kind of supernatural method to make what we want into good scenes of the picture in the planning of the city and the building of the house. So the journey to the intricate layers is endless. Weaving is also internalized as a kind of woven fabric of dense and continuous an extension of thinking. It is flexible to cultivate such a kind of wisdom. This wisdom allows us to remain in the real feelings of the cocoon and to get the sense of the flesh out of the cocoon. Eventually, we are always in the continuous dismantling and rebirth of the return in the new world. Weaving sharps itself into eyes and heart so as to make exclaim: “how vast and magnificent it is! We seem to travel through nature without knowing where it ends.”
Chinese Academy of Art has hosted “The International Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art” for three times. The first triennial with “fiber visions” as the title to erect the banner of fiber in the contemporary art world. The second triennial’s theme “weaving & we” set up the ontology of fiber life and multiple thinking of locality. This year’s theme is “boundless encounters”. As the most active textural category in modern art, fiber art involves in the critical thinking of modern urban consumption, examines the multi-context and absurd transformation of fabric in contemporary society and develops boundless imagination on the virtual platform of digital media. It probably can be said: “how vast is the sight! It seems that I’m living with Chi between heaven and earth. We can’t understand its boundary.” But on the other side of its continuous transcendence, it is also a continuous conversion to the source of people and the pain of life to the boundless interweaving of the shuttle and return.
The creative community of “boundless encounters” also provides a “field of line” for thinking and a site for discussion on the multiple links to art today. The site leads to the field of line. The weaving of ideas and the exhibition complement each other.
There is folk song in Han Dynasty: Singing a lament for crying to take a look into far distance as home journeys. This is the feeling of homesickness of the wanderer through the ages and also the concern of all the volunteers. The contemporary fiber art has gone through the expansion of the territory. Its conversion is not only the deep feeling but also the return to the new strategy. It is not only the root of the heart, but also a board view of the mountain and water in long distance. Today, “boundless encounters” with sadness and aspiration must be the adherence to original intention.