Sichuan Embroidery
01 · Historical Records
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 · Core Techniques & Process
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.
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 · Regional Records & Related Items
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.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Sichuan Embroidery.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Kang Ning (from the official archive of the associated inheritor): Female, Han ethnicity, born in August 1955, from Chongqing. Master of Chinese arts and crafts. While inheriting traditional techniques, she places emphasis on innovation and development. Her signature skill is double-sided different-image, different-color embroidery: on the two faces of a single piece she embroiders different images and different colors respectively, creating a special artistic effect. Her representative works include the double-sided 'National Beauty and Heavenly Fragrance' and the three-dimensional different-color, different-image 'Contemplation of a Quiet Lady'. Representative inheritor of Shu embroidery, a third-batch national-level intangible cultural heritage item. Huang Min (from the official archive of the associated inheritor): Female, Han ethnicity, born in August 1968, from Chongqing. In 1988 and 1992 she successively took as her teachers the two masters of Chinese arts and crafts Peng Yongxing and Hao Shuping, and has fully mastered a wide range of stitches. She is particularly skilled in the 'yijinwen' (brocade-pattern) stitch technique and in single- and double-sided embroidery, and has created new forms of single- and double-sided embroidery on ramie cloth (xiabu). The Shu embroidery techniques she applies and the works she embroiders on xiabu cloth, with its plain antique color and coarse texture, are distinguished by fine stitchwork and elegant coloring. Her works have won prizes at numerous domestic and international exhibitions and exchange events; representative pieces include the double-sided 'Peony and Carp' and the double-sided xiabu embroidery 'Panorama of Lakes and Mountains'. To transmit and carry forward Shu embroidery, she devotes herself wholeheartedly to teaching apprentices. In 2015 she was awarded the title of Master of Arts and Crafts of Chongqing, and in 2017 she was named one of the first ten outstanding inheritors of Chongqing's intangible cultural heritage handicraft techniques by the Chongqing Municipal Cultural Commission. Representative inheritor of Shu embroidery, a fifth-batch national-level intangible cultural heritage item.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Hao Shuping 01-0083
- Kang Ning 03-1241
- Huang Min 05-2598
- Meng Dezhi 05-2599
- Peng Shiping
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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