Hunan embroidery, or Xiang embroidery, as one of the traditional folk arts of
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
Cantonese embroidery
Yue embroidery (Cantonese Jyutping: Jyut6 sau3; Traditional Chinese: 粵繡), or Guangdong embroidery, is a style of embroidery folk art of the Chaoshan and Pearl River Delta region. It encompasses Guangzhou embroidery (广绣) and Chaozhou embro ...
, is regarded as the four most distinguished embroidery styles in China. It is a general name for the embroidery products which rise from and are mostly produced at Changsha, Hunan, with distinct characteristics of Chu culture. Hunan embroidery is particularly famous in embroidering with
silk thread
Silk is a natural protein fiber, some forms of which can be woven into textiles. The protein fiber of silk is composed mainly of fibroin and is produced by certain insect larvae to form cocoons. The best-known silk is obtained from ...
, and the patterns have a high sense of reality. In 2006, Hunan embroidery was selected into the first batch of national
intangible cultural heritage
An intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is a practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill considered by UNESCO to be part of a place's cultural heritage. Buildings, historic places, monuments, and artifacts are cultural property. Int ...
According to the embroidery unearthed from Chu tomb in 1958 in Changsha, Hunan, a conclusion can be drawn that the embroidery technology had developed to certain extent in some local places of Hunan early back to the Spring and Autumn period, existing in over two thousand five hundred years ago. The forty pieces of embroidered garments excavated from Mawangdui Han Tomb in Changsha in 1972, have also evidenced the excellence of the embroidery technology boomed in local places of Hunan during the Western Han Dynasty some two thousand and a hundred years ago. In the long developing course afterwards, Xiang Embroidery gradually cultivated its simple and graceful style.四大名绣-湘绣 Accessed 15.12.2016
In the 24th year of Emperor Gangxu's reign (1898),
Wu Hancheng
Wu may refer to:
States and regions on modern China's territory
*Wu (state) (; och, *, italic=yes, links=no), a kingdom during the Spring and Autumn Period 771–476 BCE
** Suzhou or Wu (), its eponymous capital
** Wu County (), a former county i ...
, son of the embroiderer Hu Lianxian, established in Changsha the first embroidery workshop, named “ Wu Caixia Embroidery Workshop” and with its products produced and marketed all by itself. And thanks to the embroideries produced there, Xiang embroidery was widely spread and made its name throughout the nation. At the end of Guangxu period, the folk art of Xiang Embroidery developed a particular embroidery system and became the incubator of market-oriented handicrafts with strong local characteristics of Hunan area different from other types of embroidery. Since then, the term “Xiang Embroidery” has been born and widely used.
The book of Changsha County written in the Tongzhi period of late Qing Dynasty, said, “In the provincial capital, women prefer embroidering to spinning, and the powerful or rich families highly praise and give great honor to embroidery.” Changsha County is the traditional base of Xiang embroidery with the name of “Home of Xiang Embroidery”, where the majority of peasant women work in embroidery. By the end of Qing Dynasty, the number of embroidery workshops had increased to 26 in Changsha County, the embroidery craftsmen had reached tens of thousands of people and the annual output of embroideries exceeded 20 thousand pieces, among which the bulk are used as daily necessities such as the quilt sheet or the pillowcase and the minority are exquisite and high quality screen covers.童芸《刺绣》黄山书社：2012
In the 1930s, the highest production value of Xiang Embroidery can reach up to 800 thousand silver dollars, and one third of it is exported abroad. During decades after liberation, Xiang Embroidery had achieved remarkable progress and been put into the list of “the four famous Chinese embroideries”, attributing to its unique style and superb embroidery technology. What’s more, it has also become the art name card of Hunan province or even the nation, with an annual total export of 5 million US dollars.
Characteristics
The proficient manipulation of different shades of grey, black and white and the natural chiaroscuro in Xiang Embroidery both enhance its texture and
stereoscopic effect
Stereoscopy (also called stereoscopics, or stereo imaging) is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image i ...
; the combination of the void and the solid in its structure makes a good use of emptiness on the embroidery cloth, thus highlighting the subject. In addition, borrowing skills of traditional painting, Xiang Embroidery has also given full play to the embroidery technology. Therefore, it finally forms a realistic, bright and simple style strongly affected by the local culture of Hunan and has the simplicity and elegance of Chinese
wash painting
A wash is a term for a visual arts technique resulting in a semi-transparent layer of colour. A wash of diluted ink or watercolor paint applied in combination with drawing is called pen and wash, wash drawing, or ink and wash.satin, soft satin, transparent
gauze
Gauze is a thin, translucent fabric with a loose open weave. In technical terms "gauze" is a weave structure in which the weft yarns are arranged in pairs and are crossed before and after each warp yarn keeping the weft firmly in place. ...
and nylon as its materials as well as a variety of colorful silk threads. Traditional Xiang Embroidery uses threads in a very distinctive way—the thread is firstly boiled with Gleditsia and then wiped with
bamboo paper
Bamboos are a diverse group of evergreen perennial flowering plants making up the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family. The origin of the word "bamboo" is uncertain, but ...
, which prevents the thread from pilling and thus is convenient for embroidering. In Xiang Embroidery, there is a special type of thread—in one thread dyed one color with different shades of that color, by which the
sfumato effect
Sfumato (, ) is a painting technique for softening the transition between colours, mimicking an area beyond what the human eye is focusing on, or the out-of-focus plane. It is one of the canonical painting modes of the Renaissance. Leonardo da V ...
can be presented after the embroidering finished. In addition, Xiang Embroidery is also renowned for its careful thread splitting technique,关于批准对洪湖莲子、薤山叠翠、碣滩茶、湘绣、马水桔实施地理标志产品保护的公告 Accessed 15.12.2016 making the thread as thin as hair. And people call the embroidery using this kind of thread “Yang Mao Xi Xiu”.
Stitch
There are 72 types of stitches in traditional Xiang Embroidery including
You stitch
In Modern English, ''you'' is the second-person pronoun. It is grammatically plural, and was historically used only for the dative case, but in most modern dialects is used for all cases and numbers.
History
''You'' comes from the Proto- ...
,
Mao stitch
Mao Zedong pronounced ; also romanised traditionally as Mao Tse-tung. (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC), ...
,
Peng hair stitch
Peng may refer to:
* Peng (surname) (彭), a Chinese name
* Peng (state) (大彭), a state during the late Shang dynasty
* Peng (mythology) (鵬), a legendary Chinese creature
* ''Peng!'', 1992 album by Stereolab
* ''PENG!'', a 2005 comic
* P.Eng. ...
,
Qi stitch
In traditional Chinese culture and the East Asian cultural sphere, ''qi'', also ''ki'' or ''chi'' in Wade–Giles romanization ( ), is believed to be a vital force forming part of any living entity. Literally meaning "vapor", "air", or "br ...
,
Ping stitch
Ping may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Fictional characters
* Ping, a domesticated Chinese duck in the illustrated book '' The Story about Ping'', first published in 1933
* Ping, a minor character in ''Seinfeld'', an NBC sitcom
* Ping, a c ...
(flatting stitch),
Wang stitch
Wang may refer to:
Names
* Wang (surname) (王), a common Chinese surname
* Wāng (汪), a less common Chinese surname
* Titles in Chinese nobility
* A title in Korean nobility
* A title in Mongolian nobility
Places
* Wang River in Thailand ...
random stitch
In common usage, randomness is the apparent or actual lack of pattern or predictability in events. A random sequence of events, symbols or steps often has no order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Individual rando ...
brocade embroidery
Brocade is a class of richly decorative shuttle-woven fabrics, often made in colored silks and sometimes with gold and silver threads. The name, related to the same root as the word "broccoli", comes from Italian ''broccato'' meaning "embos ...
,
mesh embroidery
A mesh is a barrier made of connected strands of metal, fiber, or other flexible or ductile materials. A mesh is similar to a web or a net in that it has many attached or woven strands.
Types
* A plastic mesh may be extruded, oriented, ...
knot embroidery
A knot is an intentional complication in cordage which may be practical or decorative, or both. Practical knots are classified by function, including hitches, bends, loop knots, and splices: a ''hitch'' fastens a rope to another object; a '' ...
.湘绣针法 刺绣针法 湘绣针法介绍及应用 Accessed 16.12.2016
Subject
In Xiang Embroidery, Landscape, animals and characters are common subjects, and the peonies, tigers, cats, dogs and
dragon
A dragon is a reptilian legendary creature that appears in the folklore of many cultures worldwide. Beliefs about dragons vary considerably through regions, but dragons in western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted as ...
s are the most representative designs characterized by rich changes in the layering of the colors and the high sense of painting. Embroidering landscape is relatively easier than embroidering animals, but characters are the most difficult ones to embroider with its higher requirements for the density of the thread, furthermore, it’s not easy to capture the characters’expression.
The expression “Su Embroidery’s cats and Xiang Embroidery’s tigers” circulated in the folk is a high praise for the excellence of Su Embroidery in embroidering the animal cats and Xaing Embroidery in tigers.
Use
Xiang embroidery crafts include valuable works of art, as well as materials for daily use, such as screens, quilt sheets, pillowcases, back cushions, tablecloths, handkerchiefs, embroidered shoes, etc.
Achievements
Xiang Embroidery attracts people both at home and abroad. Xiang Embroidery was praised “the threads have flawlessly and fluently covered the sketches”at the Nanyang Industrial Exposition in Nanjing In 1910. In 1915, Xiang Embroidery works won 4 more medals at the Panama Expo held in San Francisco,
America
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
. In the 1930s, the portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt embroidered by the Xiang Embroidery artist, Yang Peizhen, was sent as a personal present to President Roosevelt and is still now being showcased in the “Little White House” museum, an exhibition for the life story of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in Atlanta, Georgia, in the southeast of the US.湘绣《罗斯福绣像》誉满全球 Accessed 16.12.2016
Inheriting the traditional embroidery craftsmanship, Xiang Embroidery has made another breakthrough and created a sophisticated new type of embroidery: the Double-sided disparate embroidery, that is, in one piece of cloth, while one side of the embroidery is finished, the other side is simultaneously completed but with different colors or designs. In that sense, there is no such a thing as the obverse side or the reverse side since both sides depict a thing. The representative splendid works of this type have ''Lady Yang'', Accessed 16.12.2016 ''Hua Mulan'',花木兰 Accessed 16.12.2016 ''Viewing the Moon''望月 Accessed 16.12.2016
Because of continuous dedication to Xiang Embroidery, Xiang Embroidery has moved towards a
decorative art
]
The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose object is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. It includes most of the arts making objects for the interiors of buildings, and interior design, but not usual ...
and collection art from the practical art of living, and is often chosen as good presents which indicate the workmanship level and carry the culture of the place creates it.
Exhibition
To protect and inherit the national intangible cultural heritage and revitalize the Xiang embroidery industry, Mr.
Mao yongzhen
Mao Zedong pronounced ; also romanised traditionally as Mao Tse-tung. (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC), ...
, the chairman of TianLi Xiang Embroidery Co. Limited, established th Shaping Xiang Embroidery Museum in Hunan Accessed 16.12.2016 It is conferred “the first batch of civilian-run museums in Hunan” by the Hunan Provincial Administration of Cultural Heritage, that is, it is the first private supporting museum for the Xiang Embroidery industry in Huan. The establishment of the museum was planned in 2006 and wasn’t completed until 2010. Its predecessor was WuyiRoad TianLi Xiang Embroidery Art Gallery. The museum has now been rebuilt on the northwest corner of Xiang Embroidery Cultural Square and has been open to the public since May 18, 2010.