Page 104 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

court. And due to the emperor's interest and favor, exemplified by the album leaf of Camellias by the
silks were exquisitely woven and embroidered to
famous weaver Zhu Kerou (cat. 82), or the
mimic contemporaneous paintings, especially
anonymous Garden Rocks with High Mallow and
flower-and-bird paintings. Silk art tapestry (kesi )
CmBegonia, after a painting by Bai (act.
developed at that time to answer the demand for
fabric designs as naturalistic in style as the works of ca. 1060-1085) (cat. 83), and many others of the
favorite painters. The resulting woven paintings
were regarded not as patterned fabrics but as works flower-and-bird genre. During the Yuan dynasty kesi

of art. and embroidery also served to make Buddhist

Silk tapestry is a kind of tabby, whose distinguishing icons, such as the King of Blight Wisdom Budong
technical feature is the use of discontinuous weft
threads instead of weft threads that run the whole (cat. 85), the Heavenly King of the West (cat. 84), and
width of the fabric, as they do in ordinary woven
Sdkyanwni Buddha (cat. 86).
silks. In kesi, the weft is introduced only at the
point where its particular color is required in the In southern China, the principal area of sericulture
design, which allows the weaver enormous freedom
in the shape of the design elements. and silk production during the Ming and Qing

Zhuang Chou, a scholar of Northern Song, pointed dynasties, kesi and silk embroidery continued to be
out this feature in his book Jilei pian:"At Dingzhou
they weave kesi. But they do not employ big looms, heavily influenced by literati painting, which
and they use natural-colored silk. They string the
warps on wood and thorns. As desired, they make flourished in the Jiangnan region, heart of the
figures of flowers, plants, birds and animals, using
Ming dynasty textile industry. Women of
small spools. When they weave the wefts, they first aristocratic households, most famously the women
of the Gu family of Shanghai and Ni Renji in
reserve their places [for spools of each color], then
they take variously colored silk threads and Zhejiang, became expert at mimicking paintings in
interlace them into the warps. Along the weft
direction, [the individual masses of color] combine many varieties of embroidery, usually with finishing
to form a finished pattern, as if they were not
touches added with brush and pigments. This
connected. When the completed kesi is held up to
practice of enhancing kesi or embroidery with paint
the light, [due to the slits between adjoining colors]
it gives the appearance of engraving; hence the was prevalent during the Ming and Qing dynasties,

AChinese name kesi, meaning 'carved silk.' Qmgas seen in the dynasty kesi tapestry of Li Bai's

woman's robe of kesi takes a whole year to "Evening in the Peach and Plum Garden" (cat. 87).
complete; but although they execute 'a hundred-
flowers' or other motifs on it, it is still possible to In summary, silk, in addition to all its "practical"
make them all different, because in working with uses, has served as a ground for painting and
the small spools, the weft threads do not pass all the
way across the fabric." calligraphy, as a medium in which paintings were

superbly imitated in weaving or needlework, and as
an inspiration for the invention of paper.

Examples of wool tapestry are known from as early

as the second century bce in western China; silk
tapestry (kesi ) dating from the late Tang period
(618-907) has been found in eastern Central Asia
and Mongolia. During the Song dynasty the
techniques of kesi were adopted in China proper to
ornament objects of daily use: a shoe "upper" with
a phoenix pattern and a coverlet with a dragon
design (cat. 81) were unearthed in a Liao dynasty
(916-1125) tomb, and robes and other garments are
mentioned in written records of the period. Kesi
was also used as mountings of important paintings,
some of which have survived. Silk embroidery
might also be used for the same purposes as kesi.
Increasingly, however, from the Song on, kesi and
embroidery were devoted to making copies of
paintings, meticulously exact in every detail of
composition, form, and color. Such works are

ART OF SILK AND ART ON SILK IN CHINA 102