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Korean embroiderer
Young Yang Chung's enthusiasm for her art is
infectious. In addition to creating her own
exquisite works, Chung is dedicated to increasing
interest in and awareness of embroidery and the
textile arts, and to that end is involved in a
dizzying array of projects: she is assisting with
the planning of the Chung Young Yang Embroidery
Museum at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul,
named in her honor, and is organizing the inaugural
exhibition, scheduled to open in May 2004; she is
the curator of an exhibition of Korean embroidery,
including her own work, that will go on view at the
Asia Society Museum in New York in the spring of
2005; her book Painting with a Needle, which
includes an overview of East Asian embroidery as
well as descriptions of stitchery techniques and
instructions for nineteen embroidery projects, will
be published by Harry N. Abrams this July, to be
followed by The Arts of East Asian Embroidery,
a more in-depth analysis of the history of East
Asian embroidery, scheduled for publication in 2004.
From
the age of fourteen, Chung has produced, as she
aptly notes, "paintings with a needle."
The exuberance with which she describes Korean
embroidery, and the Chinese embroidery from which it
is derived, has won over some of the devotees of and
experts on East Asian art who have tended to ignore
the decorative arts. Her own intricate and
beautifully designed embroideries, some in
traditional mode and some in a modern key, also
challenge attitudes that have consigned textiles to
the category of craft or lesser art.
Korean
and Chinese specialists had too often paid exclusive
attention to painting and scorned the textile arts.
Because women often produced textiles, the
"craft" was deemed to be functional, with
limited intellectual and aesthetic appeal.
Traditionally, the Chinese said that "men
farmed and women wove." Fashioning of textiles
was part of a woman's employment and was in the
domain of work, not art. Though textiles could be
elaborately woven or embroidered and could be
emblazoned with beautiful colors and captivating
motifs, they were not invested with the intellectual
and spiritual content of painting and sculpture.
Their design and radiant colors could be enjoyed,
but they could never overcome their functional
origins (unlike gardening, which—as art historian
Craig Clunas, author of Fruitful Sites: Garden
Culture in Ming Dynasty China, has shown—began
as a functional pursuit, by both men and women, but
by the late Ming dynasty had evolved into an
aesthetic expression inextricably linked with
status).
Chung
has devoted her career to enhancing embroidery's
image. In her first book, The Art of Oriental
Embroidery (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1979), one of the primary works in this field, she
challenged the notion that textiles are minor arts.
A brief historical overview enables her to assert
that the embroideries on silks and satins produced
in China as early as the Warring States period
(475-221 BCE) were highly valued. The elite employed
embroiderers, most of them women, to create
costumes, bridal robes, screens, and wall hangings.
Later, during the Tang dynasty (618- 907), Buddhist
and Daoist monks recruited both male and female
textile workers to fashion robes and banners,
including mandalas. Still later, during the Ming
(1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) eras, the Chinese
imperial court drafted a sizable contingent of
embroiderers to create the five-clawed dragon robes
for the emperor and the four-clawed ones for the
immediate imperial family. Chinese embroidery
techniques traveled
to Korea and Japan, where needleworkers used them in
designing their own costumes, screens, and Buddhist
banners; the Japanese contributed the kimono, and
the Koreans unique bridal robes and accessories.
Chung concludes that "the story of silk and
silk embroidery was the story of Chinese history,
and of a major segment of its art," an
interpretation that she says applies equally well to
Japanese and Korean history.
The seminal
exhibition "When Silk was Gold," which
opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art in October
1997 and then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
March 1998, corroborated Chung's view. The show
revealed that the Chinese dynasties of Tang and Song
(960-1279) and the non-Chinese rulers of the Liao
(907-1125), Jin (1115-1234), and Yuan (1271-1368)
dynasties highly valued textiles and innovated with
the so-called kesi silk tapestry and the
"cloth of gold," which was woven with silk
and gold thread. Further confirmation of Chung's
thesis is the large bureaucracy established to
oversee textile production, particularly during the
era of Mongol rule in China. The Yuan—the Mongol
dynasty—set up a Weaving and Dyeing Office, a Gold
Brocade Office, an Embroidery Office, and a Bureau
for Patterned Satins, among other agencies, to cater
to the textile needs of the imperial court and its
officials.
However,
Chung's own life and career yield the most important
proof of the traditional and continuing aesthetic
appeal of embroidery. Born and raised in Seoul, she
first learned how to embroider from a half-Russian,
half-Korean teacher. But during the difficult years
of the Korean War, Chung's family was evacuated from
Seoul to her father's hometown in Chungchong
Province, about 150 miles southwest of the capital.
Known as Stone Village, it had a population of fewer
than one hundred people. Because of the training she
had already received in Seoul,she was adept enough
at the age of fourteen to teach, as she says,
"young country ladies five to six years my
senior to make . . . doilies to place under flower
vases and on tables, to include with their marriage
dowries." As a young girl, she sat with the
older rural women and "stitched together every
night under the dim light of a single kerosene
lamp." In the countryside, girls did everything
themselves—spinning, weaving, and stitching—to
make the necessary items for their dowries. And
although she taught them the "French"
embroidery techniques she had learned in the city,
they taught her how to pick cotton, cultivate
cocoons, dye and weave silk fabric. Despite the
hardships she and her family endured during the war
years, Chung is grateful for what she learned during
her years in the countryside.
After
three years, her family moved back to Seoul. There
she continued her education, and embroidery was part
of the school curriculum. After completing her
studies, she continued to embroider, entering
whatever competitions she could, and also began
teaching embroidery. Her skill and her remarkable
artistry were soon recognized. An advocate of
training young women in a vocation, she set up the
International Embroidery Institute in 1965. She says
she took students in, even though in those difficult
years she barely had enough to support herself. In
1967, the Korean government requested that she
organize the Women's Center, a facility where the
young unemployed homeless women who were flocking to
the city from the countryside could learn
embroidery. At that time, the economic situation was
poor, and the
country was seeking
ways to increase exports. Chung traveled overseas
looking for markets for her students' work. Her
first success was in Japan, where her students'
hand-embroidered handkerchiefs were sold in Tokyo
department stores. Also in 1967, the Korean
president's office commissioned her to craft screens
for the presidential mansion; soon orders from
Japan, Egypt, and the United States came in, keeping
Chung and her students busy.
Migrating to the
United States in the 1970s, Chung sought both to
expand her own knowledge of the East Asian tradition
of embroidery and to foster an appreciation of the
art in her adopted land. She earned a Ph.D. at New
York University, with a dissertation on the history
and techniques of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese
embroideries. Simultaneously, she devoted
considerable time and effort to the study of Western
and Eastern embroideries in the Textile Study Room
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Armed with
knowledge of the history of East Asian embroidery
and with her own creations in this medium, she set
forth on a campaign—through lectures,
demonstrations, writings, teaching, workshops, and
exhibitions of her work—to develop appreciation of
an art often stigmatized as "women's
work." A tireless advocate of and proselytizer
for a new and elevated conception of the
embroiderer's art, she traveled from Australia to
her beloved Korea to Europe lecturing about and
demonstrating the techniques and motifs of ancient
and modern East Asian embroidery. Amazed by the
trajectory of her own life and career, she writes
that "small needles and homespun silk threads
proved to be powerful, life-changing tools that
provided me with a viable vocation as well as an
expressive and rewarding creative outlet." The
effortless, skillful, and incredibly speedy way she
twists thread belies her modesty about her work with
"small needles and homespun thread."
Chung's works have
been the best advertisements for her crusade on
behalf of embroidery. Eastern patrons were the first
to recognize her talents, and even before she
initiated her academic career, her embroideries were
in the collections of the Korean president's
residence, and in the palaces of the shah of Iran
and the premier of Malaysia. The quality of her
embroideries quickly attracted attention elsewhere,
leading to commissions to produce works for the
presidential palace in West Germany and as far away
as the official residence of the mayor of Baltimore.
After her move to the United States, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian
Institution added her embroideries to their
collections.
Though some of
Chung's paintings with a needle are conceived for
small frames or small spaces, large-scale screens
dominate her studio. Because she needs one and a
half to two hours to complete one square inch, she
works on some of these screens for months at a time.
It is clear that she has derived inspiration from
the past. For example, one large screen depicts, in
ten panels, the various types of currency used
throughout East Asian history—from knife-shaped,
to spade-shaped, to round coins. Using diagonal
satin stitches, Chung gives each coin a
three-dimensional effect. Another ten-panel screen
portrays, in loving detail, Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean musical instruments, all of which play vital
roles in Confucian rituals. Affirmation of East
Asian identity and history is one of Chung's
objectives, and her depictions of stylized Chinese
characters in both the coin and musical instruments
panels reveal the same concerns.
Her most
characteristic embroideries depict plants and
animals, all of which have reverberations in Chinese
and Korean cultures. Her works illustrate her
assertion that "the ornamental vocabulary and
color schemes used by East Asian artists are replete
with symbolism." A four-panel screen of a white
crane, a symbol of longevity in East Asia, embodies
this reaffirmation of the important touchstones of
Chinese and Korean culture. The complicated use of
three varieties of gray for the neck yields a
realistic portrait of the actual colors. A depiction
of a Rose of Sharon, the national flower of Chung's
country of birth, is shaped in the form of the map
of Korea. This imaginative construction, with
branches extending to denote the outline of the
Korean peninsula, links her to her native land.
Finally, Chung has produced a bright and shiny
ten-panel screen of silvery fish and goldfish
swimming against a background of a light blue sea.
Again, symbols and references to the past permeate
the work. In East Asia, fish symbolize abundance and
prosperity, the circular placement and travels of
the fish represent longevity, and the coexistence of
goldfish and other fish presage the hoped-for union
of North and South Korea. The startling sheerness
and realism are produced by the technical ingenuity
of having the fish scales created in outline stitch
and "then finished in satin stitch with threads
twisted from sixteen individual filaments."
This
extraordinarily bright rendering of fish, which are
suffused with symbols that resonate with East Asian
traditions, reflect Chung's inextricable bond with
and love for embroidery, a passion that many
observers of her work will share.
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