Gu Embroidery

Gu is not a word I associated with needlework. A sticky chocolate pudding came more to mind.

That is telling. It betrays how little I knew about China’s embroidery tradition.  But that is now rectified after a visit to MING, an exhibition which brought to Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk the treasures of a dynasty, which ruled China between 1368 and 1644. 

Exhibition Poster: Ming

 The exhibition focuses on the commercial fortunes of China and the Netherlands, which became entwined during the Ming period. 

This was the era when the Dutch monopolized trade in lustrous Chinese porcelain, intricate carvings, and silk from the Middle Kingdom. It is the epoch that made the Netherlands rich and able to support its own talents, like Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). 

 Tucked away in dark alcoves of the Gothic Nieuwe Kerk, itself dating to 1408, were four embroideries attributed to women from the Gu Family of Shanghai.  I almost missed them.  The stitching was so fine that in the gloom, protecting them from light damage, I mistook the embroideries for pen and ink drawings on paper. 

And indeed, according to the museum notes, this Gu style of embroideries “came to be accepted alongside calligraphy and painting as an art form in the artist scholar tradition”.  I could see why.

As works in thread they are themselves remarkable technical achievements. Never mind that they mimic pen and ink almost perfectly.

Gu Embroidery Eagle

 “Serene” describes them best.  The colours are dull. Has the silk thread lost its lustre, after all the pieces are well over 450 years old?  Or was the finish intentionally matted?  Perhaps it was the poor lighting or distortion by thick, protective glass.   

The stitching, in a few strands of silk filament, is superb.  Areas are filled in the long/short stitch I have come to love.   Simple in concept, the technique is difficult to execute well.  Stitches of varying lengths are laid alongside one another to cover a surface.

Detail of Bird Embroidery

 The stitching making up the bird’s tail feathers  is perfectly vertical. Yet it creates the illusion of feathers growing at an angle.  I know perfection when I see it.

 

Horizontal lines on another work were unflinchingly straight.  On the pine tree, the bark stitching was again horizontal, but curving ever so slightly to create gnarls. Did I see ink lines too or were those single fibres?  It was hard to tell in the dim light.

Pine tree with horizontal and curved stitching

Back at home Google dredged some additional background.  Here is the gist of it.

Maio Ruijan, the name of the originator of the Gu style, has survived the centuries thanks to an album of work she signed.  At last, I had the name for the founding guru of my favourite stitching technique.  

She lived in the household of Gu Mingshi, a high-ranking imperial administrator, as concubine to his eldest son.  She based her work on classical paintings from the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1279-1368) periods. 

 Han Ximeng, concubine to Gu Mingshi's second grandson, improved upon the tradition and is considered a “needle saint.”   

 The work of these two women forms the foundation of Gu embroidery from which other Chinese embroidery styles evolved.

This information pleases me. The women are given their artistic due, even if their work is known by the name of the male head of their household. Still we must give the Gu men credit too. If they had not encouraged the women and shown their work to high-ranking male friends, we would not know if it today. Folios of Gu work are now held in the Forbidden City.

The women copied classical themes. Mimicry was not an obstacle to artistic merit, perhaps because of the technical innovation the stitchers brought to bear.  This is more problematic for contemporary western embroiderers.

The Gu embroiderers gave up the “encroaching satin stitch” in favor of new techniques, the varying long/short stitch and the “hairy stitch.”  Moreover, they created subtleties in line width by altering the number of silk strands in their needles. 

The women discovered subtleties in surface color could be achieved by simply changing the direction of silk in their needles. They used minute tone variations in silk to make transitions. 

And indeed, they worked in multi-media. Painting and embroidery were combined. So maybe I did see ink after all.  Scholars sometimes find it difficult to tell which is which, hence the term “needlepainting”.

In my attic I am stitching in the style Maio Ruijan started, a style which has gone right around the world.  But I have no illusions. The single strand of DMC cotton I use in my portraits looks like rope compared to Maio Ruijan’s few silk filaments. 

There is one more group of unsung masters in all of this: the needle makers.  You can't do fine embroidery without fine needles. Who made the ultra-fine needles the Gu ladies used? How did they form the tiny eyes on those needles? Just when I've unravelled one mystery, up pops another.