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Fiber art exhibition goes far beyond clothing
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On the ground, pink zippers coil into a large disc and rise in the middle. Among hundreds of threads crisscrossing and overlapping each other, furniture made of linen is subtly hidden. On a wall, a huge pair of panties welcomes visitors.
It’s not a seamstress’s nightmare, however. On Saturday, the Fiber and Space Art Exhibition organized by the China Academy of Art opened at Sanshang Contemporary Art Gallery in Hangzhou, where it runs through September 25.
Postgraduate and doctoral students of the academy’s fiber art studio are the artists, and the exhibition is a preview of the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, which will be held for the first time from September 21 to November 20 at the Zhejiang Art Museum.
“Fiber art is old and fresh, and nowadays artists make fibers beyond the bounds of being clothes only, but as installation artwork,” says Xiang Liping, the curator.
The art was initiated in the West in the mid-20th century, and “though it was introduced into China in the 1980s, fiber art exhibitions are not much seen in China,” says Xiang.
The artwork is intriguing because of the wide variety of media. Paper is fiber, clothes like linen and cotton are fibers, animal fur like wool and people’s hair are fibers, and so are glass fiber and nylon.
Some are understated. For example: Tape is stuck on a transparent plastic board, with air bubbles left in intentionally, and a light casts shadows of the tape on the wall to show interesting patterns.
A series work called “Reconstruction” consists of four square canvas frames wrapped by T-shirts, and each features tears and knots of sleeves. The wall-size panty, named “Silence in Riddle,” is simply a huge cotton panty with a pattern of numbers.
Some are odd. Layers of tree leaves are piled together and made into a 1-meter-long train ticket, suspended in the exhibition hall. All the characters on the ticket are carved out, but with the veins of the leaves remaining.
Several small black plastic figures are embedded in a piece of fur and the positions of their heads and legs that protrude from the fur give people hints about what they are doing.
Sewing is seen in the fiber exhibition. The piece “Tattoo” has women’s long hair sewn onto cow leather, “Lips” has yarn sewn on gauze in Suzhou-style embroidery, and the German artist Kirstin Burckhardt’s works are two wall-size white pieces of fabric with small nylon embroidery in the middle.
“People usually think embroidery means to add something, but I see the vacancy on the material,” Burckhardt says.
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