Kang Ning

01 · Lineage & Regional School

She was formerly a technician at the Shu Embroidery Research Institute of the Chongqing Cross-stitch and Embroidery Factory, and at the age of twenty-two she began studying the craft under Wang Qingyun, third-generation inheritor of Shu Embroidery. Within the regional tradition and school record of Sichuan Embroidery in Yuzhong, Chongqing: Chongqing Shu embroidery is transmitted mainly in Yuzhong District, extending also to the urban districts of Jiangbei, Shapingba, and Jiulongpo and their near suburbs. Embroidery workshops are mostly distributed along the old-city lanes near the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. Chongqing Shu embroidery and western Sichuan Shu embroidery both spring from the Ba–Shu region. Chongqing was known in ancient times as Ba Commandery and Yuzhou; since the Song and Yuan dynasties it has been a river-and-land port at the upper reaches of the Yangtze, where government-run weaving houses and folk embroidery workshops operated side by side. During the War of Resistance against Japan, Chongqing became the wartime provisional capital, and outside painters and embroidery artists gathered on the Yuzhong peninsula, exchanging skills with local embroiderers and giving rise to a Chongqing branch of Shu embroidery centered on Yuzhong District.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Female, of the Han ethnic group, born in August 1955, a native of Chongqing. She is a Master of Chinese Arts and Crafts. While inheriting traditional craftsmanship she has laid emphasis on innovation and development. Her special accomplishment is double-sided embroidery with different forms and different colors, that is, embroidering different images and colors on the two faces of a single piece, thereby producing a distinctive artistic effect. Her representative works include the double-sided embroidery Guo Se Tian Xiang (National Beauty and Heavenly Fragrance) and the three-dimensional embroidery in contrasting colors and forms You Nv Shen Si (The Secluded Goddess in Meditation). Within the documented technical tradition of Sichuan Embroidery in Yuzhong, Chongqing: Shu embroidery is one of the four great embroideries of China. It has been handed down in the Ba–Shu region to the present day, with a history of more than a thousand years, and Chongqing, with Yuzhong District at its center, is one of the main areas where it is transmitted. Compared with western Sichuan Shu embroidery and with Su, Yue, and Xiang embroideries, Chongqing Shu embroidery displays more distinctly pronounced local Chongqing character and cultural content, presenting an artistic style that is bold and exaggerated, richly imaginative, humorous and playful, and close to everyday life. It draws on traditional flowers, animals, theatrical costumes, opera masks, landscapes, city architecture, beautiful women, and modern portraits as its subjects, giving it extremely rich content. Its embroidery methods are mainly single-sided, double-sided, and different-image, different-color work. The basic techniques include laying stitch, straight stitch, slanted stitch, threading stitch, 'can' stitch, scattered long-and-short stitch, three-row stitch, floating-thread stitch, covering stitch, pressed-flower work, and upper and lower flying-color blending, making the stitch system complete and rigorous. Its technical character is such that where dense it does not form peaks and where sparse the ground is never exposed; the surface is bright and even, short stitches are fine and close, the interior is solid and the exterior loose, with well-measured tension throughout. In recent years, with social and economic development, people's aesthetic demand for clothing and home decoration has continued to grow. To adapt to this new situation, inheritors of Shu embroidery keep creating new stitch techniques and strive to bring large numbers of innovative Shu embroidery works to domestic and international markets. Through long development, the handmade techniques of Shu embroidery have become increasingly mature, forming their own system and an orderly line of transmission. The handmade nature of the craft means that every Shu embroidery work requires the artisan to invest large amounts of time and energy, and the input–output ratio is low. Coupled with the limits of family-workshop transmission, Shu embroidery faces problems such as a shortage of successors and the loss of techniques, and is in danger of dying out; it urgently needs protection. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "Double-sided differently-shaped polychrome embroidery": Kang Ning's speciality is double-sided work with different images and colours on each face, as in National Beauty and Heavenly Fragrance and the three-dimensional Goddess of the Hidden Valley. "Grounding, oblique and inserted stitches": Its methods are single-sided, double-sided and differently-shaped polychrome work, with techniques from grounding and straight and oblique stitches to floating-thread and covering stitches. "Dense without a cone, sparse without a bottom": The complete stitch system gives dense stitching that never cones, sparse stitching that never shows the ground, bright level surfaces and short, fine, taut yet relaxed stitches. "Single- and double-sided embroidery on grass cloth": Huang Min applied Shu technique to coarse grass cloth, creating single- and double-sided grass-cloth embroidery noted for fine stitching and elegant colour, as in Peonies and Carp.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

A national representative bearer of Sichuan Embroidery, a third-batch national intangible cultural heritage project.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Kang Ning · National Representative Bearer Archive