Visiting Suzhou Silk Museum last year, I came across a small room crammed with a complex and hulking working loom. A web of spun fibres shot out from every angle, fixed and pulled from interconnected wooden poles and poured down from the highest battens like a waterfall. Bright green and red threads raced across the beams and were transfigured below into woven fabric with a floral design. The dyed yarns queued at the rear in dense rows like paint tubes, ready to be shed, picked and battened into intricately patterned textiles. Approaching this impressive contraption I was further surprised to find two women crouched at the base, hidden under a suspended ceiling of yarns. Their hands flickered across the fibres as if playing the harp, fingers dancing in the dappled light, as they interlaced the yarns by instinct whilst shooting the breeze.
One of China’s major silk producers since the Song dynasty (10th – 13th centuries AD), Suzhou was one of three state-owned weaving centres. These hubs produced highly prized textiles for the royal family and imperial court as well as offering the surplus goods. The silks, made for both daily wear and ceremonial rituals, were praised by the Ming dynasty official Zhang Han as ‘so magnificent and exquisite that those made outside Suzhou are considered plain and unworthy.’ The world’s earliest silk, dating back four millennia, was found in neighbouring Huzhou, benefitting from an abundance of mulberry trees to feed the worms and water favourable to reeling the delicate fibres. Like the threads running over and under the loom, silk has long been integrated into Chinese culture, embedded into customs and daily life in the cycle of births, celebrations, marriages, ageing and funerals.
What makes silk so alluring? It conjures up images of bamboo baskets of mulberry leaves, courtesans in flowing robes and camel-trawling merchants traversing desert caravanserai. Or maybe that’s just me. Admired from East and West, it is nostalgically conjured by the ‘Silk Roads’, coined by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen to describe the ancient and prosperous trade routes stretching from Eastern China to inner Europe. It has a polished sheen, lightweight and diaphanous, yet has a greater tensile strength than steel. It’s difficulty to produce only adds to its appeal. Somewhere between 5000 and 7000 silkworms perish for one pound of raw silk, with the fibres gently extracted from their protective cocoons. Associated with the luxury and exoticism of a generic and mysterious Far East, the fabric was criticised by the ancient Romans for being too revealing and for promoting licentiousness. This failed, however, to dent its popularity, with huge sums of gold exchanged for loads of the stuff to brought over from China. It was only through the guile of monks smuggling silkworm eggs into sixth century Europe that the fiercely guarded monopoly China held over silk was finally broken.
A particular painting on silk caught my eye at the National Silk Museum in Huzhou. It depicted a calming scene of riders on horseback, tending their mounts amongst soft hills and hanging willows in a gentle mix of yellows, blues and greens. The outlines were characteristically sharp, the trees detailed and textured, and the colours even and smooth. I’ve been painting on silk for a couple of years now but am nowhere close to being an expert. Like pottery, blacksmithing or weaving itself, silk painting is a craft with an incredibly rich and somewhat overwhelming history, with long treatises on the different effects created by varying shaped brushes and the purity of pigments.
Acknowledging its dense bibliography, the contemporary painter Hao Liang notes that “the metaphysical nature of its aesthetics has determined its complexity. Within the ancient Chinese painting system, the structural language of brushwork and ink is extremely complex, and colours are only supplementary elements. The brushwork for the mountains, clouds, trees and water were entirely different from one another [for classical painters].” Where do you even start when branches, hills and ponds have their own distinct techniques? Contemporary artists pushing the boundaries of the material in very different ways include Do Ho Suh, who uses colourful silk fabric in his large installations of ghostly spaces, perhaps wisely avoiding any paint. In contrast, Hao Liang is a student of traditional painting who intertwines references to Borges and Dante with his classical training in guohua ink wash painting.
There is something affirming about painting on a material with such a rich cultural heritage. It carries both the burdens of tradition and the possibilities of breaking out of it. Investigating a new material, trying to respect its cultural history whilst doing it on my own terms, does provide a deeper and more meaningful relationship with the medium I use to paint on. Unlike a regular canvas, the fabric is sheer allowing light through, making transparent any imperfections or blotting. As I’ve learnt at cost, it is a highly unforgivable painting surface.
Soft and supple, raw silk is usually treated before being painted on. The traditional method uses a mixture of alum, to help the pigment bind to the surface, and gelatin glue, usually of the foul-smelling animal-derived sort, as a hardener. This encourages a certain slowness, washing over the carefully proportioned solution to prepare it for painting, before allowing pigment to seep into the fabric, requiring time to dry and the coating of multiple layers for colours to remain bright. The surface is smooth and even, unlike the typically rough texture of canvas. And most of all, it carries its own particular history, of imperial courts, ceremonial rituals and discourses on brushwork. It is visually intriguing and pleasantly tactile, at once impenetrable and captivating - in many ways, much like the traditional looms used to produce it.
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