Threads of change

By Liya Prilipko

A thread speaks an eloquent and universal language. It has for centuries been a vehicle for story-telling, reflecting human experiences in a kaleidoscopic variety of genres: weaving, knitting, and quilting, sewing and crocheting, tapestry and embroidery, including some of the most recent textile endeavors in fiber art, fashion, design, science and technology. Throughout most of human history, women have been the primary (often the only) storytellers, makers of the world’s fates and fortunes. Creative offerings of their thread-based arts and crafts embellished virtually every aspect of humans’ life, shaped rituals and defined cultures, societies, and individuals. Destinies of entire nations have relied on the handiwork of untold generations of women. However, the stories of the hardworking spinners, weavers, and embroiders have often been overlooked, silenced, or simply forgotten. 

Embracing and re-examining techniques that have been traditionally linked with women’s craft, a young Chinese female fiber artist, Fanglu Lin takes story-telling associated with the realm of thread and cloths to the level of the sculptural, and often, the monumental. Her first solo exhibition at Art+ Shanghai Gallery “Threads of Change” speaks volumes about the need to unveil and transform women’s obscure lives. Having lived and worked next to the craftswomen of Bai and Dong ethnic minority groups in China, honing her skills as a fiber artist, Lin has incidentally become the witness to these women’s joys and sorrows, hopes, and regrets, struggles and achievements. These fortuitous emotional encounters, more than anything else, have shaped her artistic aspiration and visual language. 

Each place she goes she mines local knowledge to inform work that transcends geographic and temporal boundaries. Each puncture she makes in the cloth lets the light through to illuminate the female experiences she has witnessed. Each knot ties an ever-stronger connection between the ancestors, the generations living today, and the future generation of women to come. Each stitch narrates the untold story of women who throughout history have been engaging in manual labor in the fields, crafts, and households, and have been relegated to anonymity nonetheless. 

Fanglu Lin began working with fabrics as the main medium for her work in 2014 when she traveled to Zhoucheng village in the city of Dali, Yunnan, China. As she studied tie-dyeing techniques of the Bai minority ethnic group with local artisan women, she became fascinated with the process of tying, the step so fundamental in creating patterns on the famous blue and white Bai fabrics, and yet so paradoxically underappreciated. Hours, days, and months of strenuous work and dedication lay silently under an alluring excess of texture, shapes, and patterns. In the traditional process of crafting tie-die fabrics, all knots come undone after dyeing. The thread is cut and removed, rigorously folded pleats and stitches responsible for elaborated patterns become the fleeting memories - the evanescent glow of anonymous backbreaking manual labor on the finished dyed fabric. Fanglu Lin makes the scrupulous needlework the defining feature of her art. With the simplest of auxiliary tools, she transforms plain fabric into undulating landscapes of knots and pleats, just like the artisan women in Dali. Rather than making flat works, the artist experiments with complicated geometrical patterns and traditional types of stitching she has learned in the village, pushing the pliable medium into three dimensions, producing tactile objects of art that entice viewers to reach out and touch them.  

Coming across Lin’s Bai tie-dye-inspired series is a visceral experience. Imagine seeing corals for the first time in your life without knowing what you are looking at. An exuberant carnival of shapes, knobs, and bulges. Peculiar forms of nature-informed abstractions respond to your presence. Myriads of them seem to be repeating themselves, and yet no two are alike. They grow and sprawl like cell division, rose petals and thorns, seashells, jellyfish with short tentacles and longer stinging arms. They are the landscapes of gently rolling hills, forests, rivers and streams, fields of rice and wildflowers viewed from above. Lin’s cotton membrane of twirls and pleats is nothing short of mesmerizing. Her works intensify our ritual of touch, expanding the power of our sensory perception, and increasing our contact with the self and the world around us. 

The artist’s further exploration of Bai’s culture, history, lifestyle, and zā huā techniques (in Bai dialect 扎花 [zā huā] is colloquial for tie-dying) culminated in a creation of a monumental wall installation titled She that was awarded the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2021. Lin’s She is meters of cotton fabric laboriously stretched, pulled, squeezed and tucked, folded, gathered, pleated, knotted, and stitched. She is one of her many pure and forceful works made of pliable media that pays tribute to and celebrates women whose names are not written in history but whose hard work and devotion to the life of making carried on the ancient craft traditions, including the ones of Bai tie-dying, to the present day.

The artist’s passion for discovering the world of ancient textile crafts and the lives of women who weave the thread of history with their hands led to a new artistic expedition. In 2020, she traveled to the village of Sanbao in Guizhou province where she learned the spinning, weaving, and dyeing traditions of the local Dong (Kam) people. Discovering the stories behind Dong's traditional bright fabrics inspired new series of works entitled Light and Hammer. 

Whether a large wall installation or a smaller sculptural work, the pieces possess an arresting beauty. The iridescent sheen of Dong’s hand-crafted fabrics and organic meandering contours of the sculptures command a viewer to stop and look intently. What are these shimmering, wrinkled curves frozen in a dance-like motion? The effortless loops, arching upwards and folding on top of each other, embark our imagination on a trip. Are they rising or collapsing? Exhaling or inhaling? Shrinking or expanding? Our attention is then drawn to the surface. Is it leather that we see, warped metal, paper, or, indeed, fabric? Like with many of Lin’s works, a daring thought crosses your mind: “Can I touch it while no one is looking?"

The sculptures invite us to perceive their physicality and kinetic force behind them. They are anything but still. As we circle around them, we provide the movement which helps to reveal the restlessness of these works. Impossible to hold as a single image, they look different from every point of view. 

The sculptural compositions of concave and convex forms are the artist’s impressions of the Dong craftswomen - the keepers and carriers of hundreds-of-years-worth of knowledge and secrets of the trade. The serpentine curves of the sculptures are inspired by their body shapes. Their wrinkled faces, hunched backs, and rough hands are masterpieces - artworks built on a lifetime of stoic and practical love for their families, their people, and their culture. The fiber of their strong characters is made up of hard work and perseverance, but also of joy found in craft-making and signing that the Dong people are so famous for. It is this stamina as well as dedication to the craft carried through their lives until old age that has made a deep impression on the artist. 

“The power of the old woman…”, says Fanglu Lin with aspiration in her voice. Her mind is then carried away, as we sit in her studio in the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai where she is completing her artist residency program. She is now scanning through experiences in the village that brought back this sentiment of admiration and awe. “I once followed an old woman up to the mountain at 5 o’clock in the morning to collect the bark of the ailanthus (chòuchūn) tree, we then returned to the village to continue dying the fabrics. Despite her old age and pains in her back, she kept herself busy every day.” 

Against the lush emerald backdrop of the mountains, the silhouette of this 85-year-old woman astonished the artist. That moment in time got captured within the folds and coils of the sculpture, the sheen of its surface, and the kaleidoscope of stitches on the fabric. Lin translated strong feminine energy into the sculptural forms with the vector of strength and resilience. Effortless loops and curves defy gravity, albeit wrinkled, they soar up, ready to pounce.

The bright fabrics with copper sheen employed in Lin’s sculptures are the handiwork of the Dong women artisans of Sanbao village. Traditionally the fabrics are made through a number of laborious processes that last throughout the year. They begin with planting and growing cotton and dyes, spinning fibers into yarn, and weaving cotton cloth. They end with repetitive lengthy cycles of dying, folding, washing, drying, and beating the cloth with wooden mallets. The shiny fabrics similar to the ones Fanglu Lin employs in her sculptures take even longer to craft and therefore reserved for ceremonial attires. For the fabric to acquire its characteristic bronze sheen, it has to go through more additional steps that many of today’s artisans are becoming reluctant to take. Lin’s gilded fabrics go through even more cycles of dying than the original tradition demands, for them to obtain the texture and sheen desired by the artist. 

The more tedious the process is, the brighter the fabric becomes. The brighter Lin’s sculptures shine, the clearer her artistic metaphor comes across: demanding environments and life circumstances shape the strongest of women’s characters. A woman's color and sheen may eventually fade, but the tightly woven fibers that her character is made of can withstand almost any pressure that comes her way. 

Bai and Dong's unique and complex artisanal traditions have less and less place in our world of instant gratification. Preserving them has been an important stimulus in Lin’s artistic practice, however, it is the admiration for women behind the craftsmanship and the desire to support their dwindling communities that have been the driving force behind the creation of her artworks.  

As a Chinese fiber artist, Fanglu Lin joins the international choir of strong female voices, the pioneers and revolutionaries of thread-based art like Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Claire Zeisler, Lenore Tawney, Miriam Shapiro, and contemporaries like Sheila Hicks, Mingyue Yue, Chiharu Shiota, Billie Zangewa, Faith Ringgold, Joana Vasconcelo, and many more female artists from around the globe that have been re-examining our understanding of women’s crafts by pushing the boundaries in fine art and life, inventing new possibilities for pliable media of textile and new opportunities for women whose stories they have been dedicated to tell. 

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