An Exhibition of Embroidery by Nien Pihua

December 16, 2020

An Exhibition of Embroidery by Nien Pihua

Dates of Exhibition:

28 November to 30 December 1990

Venue:

Culture Gallery of the Council for Cultural Planning and Development

Organised by:

Council for Cultural Planning and Development, Executive Yuan

Embroidery is one of China's ancient handicraft arts and was developed here earlier than anywhere' else in the world. From its earliest beginnings through the Sui, T'ang, and Five Dynasties period (581 to 960), embroidery was mainly used as a functional decoration. By the Sung dynasty (960 to 1279), however, some of it was elevated into the realm of pure art, no longer serving simply as a decoration for. Clothing or furniture but imitating paintings and works of calligraphy by noted artists for the delectation of connoisseurs.

As time went by, along with continuous progress in materials, techniques, and concepts, embroidery attained ever higher levels of achievement and developed into an independent art with its own outstanding tradition. In modern times, the rapid development of science and industry, dramatic social changes, and the steady substitution of machinery for hand labor have threatened its survival as an art form.

Sewing machines have speeded up production, but their stitching is monotonous and repetitious, and their products are far inferior to handmade embroidery in terms of artistry. As a result, the art of embroidery, which once enriched the lives and expanded the artistic sensibilities of the common people, has now fallen on hard times. The situation has been exacerbated by the high cost of labor, which has cramped the development of handicrafts in general.

At a time when this traditional handicraft has generally been neglected, we are pleased to discover that one artist has been quietly toiling away, researching traditional embroidery techniques, combining classical forms with modern aesthetic concepts, and opening a new world for the art of embroidery. That person is Nien- Pihua, who stands at the forefront of the art of embroidery in the R.O.C. today.

Hailing from Lukang, in western Taiwan, Ms. Nien took up embroidery twenty years ago, studied traditional Chinese needlework methods and fused that heritage with modern aesthetic concepts to produce "embroidered jewelry," which combines the designs and techniques of embroidery and metalworking, breaking through conventional patterns and forms and revealing her special feeling for color.

In her hands, the needle becomes a brush and the cloth a canvas, where she stitches out a world of her own with myriads of threads. Realizing that an art form's vitality lies in constant change and creativity, she has boldly promoted renovation and reform by bringing in new ideas and innovations. During the 1970s she made a systematic study of traditional Chinese embroidery. Based on that foundation, timing the 1980s she strove toward research and development, combining the ancient with the modem and the native with the foreign in patterns and forms. Having achieved complete mastery of her art, she now creates just as she wishes, developing unprecedented new forms and refining and broadening the parameters of the genre.

Embroidery is a unique Chinese handicraft with a long history of development and many glorious achievements behind it. How that art may be extended, advanced, and adapted to modern society are questions of deep concern to anyone who has enjoyed the beauty of Ms. Nien’s works.

Postmodern Embroidery

Ever since the Opium war in the 1040s, China has moved slowly from an agricultural to an industrial society, and its people have come to accept an industrial way of life in terms of food, clothing, shelter, transportation,. . . and other areas. Great changes have also occur-red in the arts and aesthetics, and how to understand, reflect, and express those changes has become an issue of great concern to all artists.

Before the 20th century, most Chinese artists still adhered to a system of artistic and aesthetic principles that had been developed in an agricultural society and was beginning to fall behind the times because of rapid social changes. Artists in the first half of the century boldly advocated abandoning their traditional artistic heritage in favor of complete modernization and westernization, but they soon discovered that a semiology of the arts is inextricably intermeshed with the total cultural matrix and cannot be casually abandoned, transplanted, or resynthesized.

Because modern Western aesthetics have grown and developed from the artistic heritage of traditional Western society, they are naturally permeated with Western modes of thinking. The Chinese artist's central task is learning to understand the criteria and modes of thought of Chinese culture, examining the relationship between the art and aesthetics of agricultural society and life in an industrial society, finding points of overlap between them, and then creating art and developing an aesthetics that reflect and express Chinese life in industrial society.

Embroidery was one of the earliest forms of art to develop in China. Traces of it have been found on fragments of fabric unearthed with bronzeware at Western Chou burial sites, and the ancient Shang-shu, or Classic of Documents, records how the emperor Shun instructed his successor in setting up a dress code for the various court ranks: "I wish to see the signs of the ancients, the sun, moon, stars, mountains, dragons, and splendid creatures,' together with temple vessels, aquatic grasses, fire, rice, and other embroidered decorations, emblazoned on your garments in all the five colors." Every dynasty thereafter had its dress code regulations. Practical manufacture and theoretical inquiry advanced hand in hand, until embroidery reached a peak among the officials and the common people doing the Ch'ing dynasty. In being practiced by the aristocracy and the common people alike for more than 2,000 years without a break, embroidery can be considered unique among all the world's various art forms.

At the upper level, traditional embroidery was closely bound up with the tastes of the aristocrats and the rituals, of the political system, while on the lower level it formed an integral part of the interests and daily life of the common people. It is a semiological system full of flexibility and room for diversification that, appropriately adjusted, can be developed and enhanced even more fully in 20th-century industrial society, and even post-industrial society.

The aesthetics of industrial society, which are characterized by exclusiveness and the rejection of tradition, have severely limited the development of modern embroidery. But the postmodern aesthetics of post-industrial society, which value diversity and eclecticism, enable the vocabulary of traditional embroidery to be used naturally in the syntax of post industrial culture, opening up new fields of expression that are well worth exploring and pursuing.

Ms. Nien Pihua is striving in her embroidery in just that direction. The diversity, individuality, and deconstructionist modes of thinking that are valued in post-industrial society have many areas in common with the aesthetics of traditional embroidery. That she has grasped this point and gone on to explore and develop its implications is both gratifying and admirable.

She has diversified the materials of thread to include not only all kinds of silk but also metallic fiber in order to reflect the new sensibility of the post-industrial information era. In addition, she has combined embroidery with jade, bronze, ceramics, and other materials to create a new genre called "embroidery jewelry" and has expanded the forms of embroidery while preserving traditional needlework techniques. Most importantly, embroidery jewelry is well suited to express the unique individual feelings of the person making it and is less time-consuming to manufacture than traditional embroidery, giving people in today's hectic world the time and ability to take it up.

In recent years, Ms. Nien has made even more use of metallic thread, letting embroidery encroach further on the territory of jewelry and metalworking. She studied jewelry and metalworking at the Royal College of Art in London in 1989 and 1990, successfully fusing them with the language of embroidery and creating works that captured top honors overseas, winning her international recognition for her outstanding achievements.

Post-industrial society is a consumer society in which creativity reigns, in which designers and consumers both strive for products that are unique and different. The mass scale production model of the industrial era is a thing of the past. What people value in post industrial society is diversity and small quantities. As a result, handicraft items are encroaching more and more on the realm of pure art.

With that in mind, Ms. Nien has devoted part of her efforts to studying how to free embroidery from the shackles of traditional "functionality" so that it can achieve an independent position of its own on an equal footing with the other plastic arts. Many great changes have occurred in the world of painting since the Second World War, among the most important being the combination of painting with other artistic media to achieve textural effects and formal breakthroughs.

Ms. Nien has put forward original views of her own in this respect as well, combining the traditional folk vocabulary of the arts of sewing, embroidery, and paper cutting with various post-industrial linear materials to reflect and express contemporary social phenomena and urban feelings, charging them with a deconstructionist beauty of the concrete and the abstract, and raising a pleasantly surprising now postmodern voice.

That embroidery, in her hands, can achieve such rich and various artistic forms lies outside the scope of most people's expectations. Now that she has opened up this new postmodern road, fusing the traditional and the contemporary, with all its inexhaustible potential, we hope 'that she will continue to share with us the latest scenery along the way.