Broadcast of ancient craft draws a massive audience

Wang Wenying displayed her machine embroidery in a combination of modern and traditional styles during a livestream in Zhejiang province on Saturday.

It is part of a project that the province in East China uses to promote its traditional techniques. The project was launched last year and recently went online due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, its organizers said.

Wang demonstrated some of her awarded works, one of them a cat on a cane basket. She used at least 20 types of white threads to embroider the head. “In this way, the pattern can present a 3D effect,” Wang said.

She also guided her apprentice, Wang Yanli, to create a machine embroidery in the livestream.

Wang Wenying, who was born in 1944 in Hangzhou, has a studio at an art and craft museum in the provincial capital.

When there are visitors, she usually explains the craft while embroidering. But she does not allow many visitors around her sewing machine because as few as five or six people would interfere with the light in the room.

However, the livestream enabled several thousand people to learn about her techniques, local media reported.

Embroidery has a long history in China, but embroidery using sewing machines, which originated from Hangzhou, is not commonly known. It is not as easy as people think, Wang Wenying said. She added that it takes far more than one or two months to learn — it is yearslong or even lifelong learning.

Wang Wenying is an important figure in using imported goods to inherit traditional culture in Hangzhou. She has helped Hangzhou machine embroidery become a unique category of embroidery, according to local media.

She completed a double-faced embroidery with varied colors in 1977, a breakthrough craft in the transition from machine-embroidered daily articles to artworks.

She was one of the first to create animal portraits with embroidery using sewing machines in 1984 and helped create stitch techniques to embroider subjects such as animals, scenery and images from Chinese and Western paintings and photos.

Irina Bokova, the then director-general of UNESCO, admired her machine-embroidered screen work during a visit to the Hangzhou art and craft museum in 2012.

The work is a colorful depiction of the new Leifeng Pagoda, whose reconstruction was completed in 2002, as well as its surrounding scenery. The reverse side depicts the old pagoda in white and black.

Wang Wenying said it was difficult to complete the work because of the complex nature of having to embroider images on two different sides. The new and old pagodas look alike yet differ a lot, she said.

She failed many times before she could complete the artwork.

Wang Wenying, who has worked in machine embroidery since she was 20, now focuses her efforts on innovation and inheritance of the techniques.

Passing on the techniques to apprentices is her main goal, as long as her eyesight remains good, she said.