Commissioned by The Peninsula Hotels and exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the work She’s Bestowed Love is a large-scale piece from my 2023 series She’s Body. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Xiaoxin Li.This series centers on the female body as its primary narrative. Through the use of vivid red as the dominant color, it explores the symbolic meanings of blood and life. Red runs throughout the series as a continuous visual thread, like a flowing vein that connects vital energy with emotional memory. It signifies not only wounds, but also the marks left after healing—the scars that become emblems. It records pain, while also bearing witness to recovery. It is the pulse of female life, and a manifestation of its strength.
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.