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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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