As a textile artist, Lin Fanglu uses traditional Chinese female craft techniques to create a space for exploring and re-examing the realms of belonging, conflict and alienation. She believes that the art of indigo tie-dye, passed down for thousands of years in Yunnan’s ethnic regions, embodies local women’s unwavering resilience of dedication. The process of extracting and shaping from tradition provides a unique means for Lin Fanglu’s reflections and artistic experimentations, as she adeptly transforms fabrics into contemporary designs and sculptures. As an outsider to the Bai ethnic group, driven by her genuine passion for learning and understanding local crafts, she visited Zhoucheng village in Dali, Yunnan province, China, in 2014. There, she immersed herself in the ancient Indio tie-dye techniques of the community, collaborating closely with local female artisans as she attempted to transcend geographical and ethnic boundaries in pursuit of a harmonious fusion of tradition and creativity.
In 2020, Fanglu traveled to the village of Sanbao in Guizhou province where she learned the spinning, weaving, and dyeing traditions of the local Dong (Kam) people. Discovering the stories behind Dong’s traditional bright fabrics inspired new series of works entitled Light and Hammer.
Lin believes that women have tirelessly stitched their labour into the fabric of domestic family life, as narrators, educators and caretakers. However, their voices and experiences are often neglected, concealed and silenced in society. Lin Fanglu asserts that despite their
devotion to a family and home, women cannot easily escape a sense of confinement and isolation amid the rapid pace of societal change.
This video was produced for the solo exhibition ‘The Power of Binding and Weaving’ at Samgaksan Geumam Museum of Art in Seoul.
Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art presented Russia’s first exhibition of works by the Chinese artist Fanglu Lin elevating and ennobling the practice of textile art.
While learning the indigo tie-dye method from Bai artisans, Lin Fanglu developed a curiosity about the tying process, and essential step in creating intricate patterns on the fabric. She realized its often-overlooked significance and began to think more about the nature of the craft in relation to its creators. Traditionally, transforming a piece of cloth into a tie-dye masterpiece involves using a stencil to mark the outline of a design to a surface of the cloth. Following the design, the cloth is then bunched and tied with thread in many places, which transforms it
into a tightly gathered irregular shape that is then submerged in a dyeing solution and left to dry. Once the fabric is dry, the tied threads are removed to reveal the intricate indigo-and-white design of the finished cloth. The women artisans work diligently to create the exquisite tie-dye patterns, yet their delicate and skillful bunching and tying is ultimately dismantled to achieve the final product. Lin Fanglu sees this act of removing the threads in the process of achieving a result as representative of women’s invisible labour.