Design and Cultural Aspects of 20th Century Chinese Xiangjin Brocade

Chinese Xiangjin brocade is indigenous to Hangzhou, with West Lake Xiangjin brocade being the most typical one, thus it has distinct cultural characteristics of the West Lake [19]. As shown in Figure 1, in Xiangjin brocade photos are taken as negatives and full use of strong points of photographic art is made through the form of brocade paintings. Thus, it integrates the styles of traditional national painting, western photographic art, and modern oil painting into one. Combining tradition with innovation, silk weaving paintings have the same effect as photos, being exquisite, vivid and lifelike.

Fig. 1

Japanese technologist Yanagi Souetsu argued as follows: “All the handicrafts in history that are closely related to local history and culture have striking local features” [20]. In ancient times, brocade with themes of the Ten Sights of the West Lake already existed. According to “Miscellany of the East Hangzhou City” by Li E in the Qing Dynasty, the eastern part of Hangzhou city was well-known for making silk brocade [21]. Compared with traditional brocade, Xiangjin brocade is more expressive in terms of colour transition and vivid depiction of water waves, clouds, and flowers. In addition to technological innovation, it has adhered to the open spirit of art from the earliest times to the present day.

Personage Xiangjin brocades are images of celebrities, historical figures, national leaders, and religious figures. Among them, religious figures can be categorized into Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity and folk beliefs.

For example, Budda image Xiangjin brocade is created on the theme of gods and goddesses to meet the needs of the market, which truly reflects people's psychological activities of traditional ethics, moral customs, and pursuit of happiness. As shown in Figure 2, its composition and coloration are done on the basis of the artistic skills of Chinese paintings in the past and the luxuriant colours of Western paintings, which have pushed the art of brocade to a higher level. Later, Xiangjin brocade tends to converge Chinese religious culture and select those gods who can benefit people in reality as their themes, just like the three gods of fortune, prosperity and longevity, the eight immortals, Magu, and the god of wealth. The corresponding representative works include Magu's Birhday Offering, Kuan-yin Buddha, Panchen Lama, the Ascension, and the Virgin Mary.

Figure 2

Painting Xiangjin brocade is mainly woven with silk thread to manifest fine brushwork, freehand brushwork, and Chinese painting that combines fine brushwork with freehand brushwork. As shown in Figure 3, its themes include landscapes, flowers, birds, and figures. Designers often refer to the works of famous painters in south of the Yangtze river like Tang Bohu, Shen Zhou, and Shen Quan, therefore this kind of brocade has tranquility and elegance of ink paintings, but also natural and unrestrained charm silk products [22]. In addition to the use of colour gradation to reveal shadow change, such multi-weft colourful Xiangjin brocade mainly uses the ups and downs of weft threads to form colourful scenery [23]. In terms of painting performance, it inherits techniques of traditional Chinese paintings, religion paintings, New Year pictures, print making, classical oil paintings, and western contemporary paintings. Its artistry exceeds the most precious “double brocade” hanging scroll in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Fig. 3

Practical Xiangjin brocade is a kind of multi-coloured brocade whose two-warp-multi-weft structure becomes a one-warp-three-weft structure, in which one group of warps interweave the weft to form ground tissue, while another two groups of wefts weave flowers on the ground tissue [24]. As shown in Figure 4, with bright colours and exquisite composition, it draws on themes such as plums, orchids, bamboos, chrysanthemums, platforms, pavilions, ladies, and landscapes. Moreover, it combines the art of traditional Chinese painting with that of decoration and the art of living; hence, it is full of distinctive national characteristics and oriental charm. Practical brocade is the extension of the first three kinds thereof, which combines landscape and figure painting brocade with decorative art and everyday life art. It also belongs to colorful brocades, but its structure is reduced from 2 longitude and multi-latitude to 1 longitude and 3 latitude, and a group of weft and warp interweaves are organised.

Fig. 4

Compared with traditional brocade, Xiangjin brocade highlights its craftsmanship. These products include silk fans, silk umbrellas, screens, hanging scrolls, table girth, bags, carpets, cushions, and clothing, New Year pictures, wall calendars, national gifts, and brocade taking patterns from Chinese paintings in the Song Dynasty and overseas collections. As the West Lake Expo Daily introduced: “Xiangjin brocade can be used for hall hanging, study ornament, orchid boudoir enjoyment, elegance and pleasance” [25]. Business Monthly also reported: “one important art invention which can be used for gift-giving and decoration.”[26] The small ones are made of scraps of other fabric products so they can save cost and increase output, warmly welcomed by customers at home and abroad.

Modern portrait Xiangjin brocade is analysed from the perspective of iconology, including focus perspective composition highlighting theme patterns, changes in peripheral decoration and regular restrictions on area size layout, and the combining of various theme patterns or multiple theme patterns into central patterns; secondly, the use of complementary, contrast and other colors to give people a strong visual feeling, set off the theme of the pattern and convey a festive and cheerful psychological feeling at the same time. The picture space depicts all kinds of scenes with the method of “focus perspective” to make the vision disappear on the horizon to form a very strong visual space, with the arrangement of the distance and proximity of the characters also taking into account the change of perspective. The arrangement of the foreground characters focuses on the traditional “scattered points” design method, while the prospective character design accords with the perspective law, that is, with the help of focus perspective to strengthen the visual extension effect of the picture, in order to produce a strong sense of depth. At the same time, the “multiple focal points” method is used to narrow the picture space, reflecting the closeness of the foreground picture, as shown in Figure 5.

For example, in the 1960s, the Xiangjin brocade fabric “Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan” (Figure 5 a) was designed and made with reference to the oil painting created by Liu Chunhua. The work was characterised by a large picture size, a large number of colored filaments, complex craftsmanship and strong artistic effect.

From the composition of Xiangjin works, we can capture the application mode of focus perspective in the picture.

The head portrait is arranged like a “label”, and its size changes with the change of the background theme, which is not limited by the focus of the vanishing centre..

The authors attempted to compare and analyse the composition of focus perspective in the visual art of Xiangjin brocade through the perspective images of Figures 6 and 7. In Figures 6c and 7c, planes a, b and c represent one-point perspective and two-point perspective, including western landscape painting and traditional boundary painting, respectively. Taking the landscape Xiangjin brocade as an example, the western painting method of “two-point perspective” is used as shown in Figure 6 a, b, c. Among them, a plane produces perspective, and three faces, a, b and c, can be seen, thus when the length of h1 and h2 changes, which meets the requirements of perspective, with the expansion of the depth of field, h1 becomes shorter and shorter, thus reflecting the true sense of space of the picture.

When we take the Xiangjin brocade of traditional Chinese painting as an example (Figure 7 a, b), only two planes, a and c, can be seen: the viewer cannot see the b side, and the a side is directly facing the audience, representing the animal theme in the foreground without perspective. Therefore, most of the subjects of traditional Chinese painting like Xiangjin brocade belong to this type. The h1 and h2 represent parallel heights, while all objects behind animals will change with the depth of field. This structural arrangement has been widely used because it can produce a sense of singularity in depth, which is in line with the practical function of attracting visitors.

From the comparison of perspective drawings, we can see that different picture effects are produced by the combination of western painting and traditional painting. The influencing factors of the visual art composition of portrait brocade are summarised as follows: Firstly, traditional Chinese painting requires the integrity of picture information for the long scroll vertical axis or horizontal axis composition, and presents a panoramic picture through a high point of view, where there is no overlap between the objects in the painting. In this way, the design composition is more conducive to the development of panoramic description. Secondly, Xiangjin brocade craftsmen affected by the traditional aesthetic still retain traditional composition habits in the process of composition and theme change, as well as traditional Chinese painting, landscape painting and other well-known composition forms. Thirdly, as people's aesthetic transformation needs time, in order to meet the aesthetic needs of people, the integration of China and the West has become a better way of transition. The complete combination of scatter perspective and focus perspective has become an obvious feature of the Xiangjin image composition form.

From the product category of Xiangjin brocade in relation to its shape and theme, its greatest features are “daily” and “civilian”, which mainly comes from the market demand. Therefore, decorative patterns from the traditional Chinese painting theme to the western oil painting theme of Xiangjin brocade are first reflected in the stylised modelling of the motif of the pattern, especially in the modelling of “landscape painting”, “characters” and “landscape architecture”. This stylised modelling is a typical realistic painting decoration style, which creates a new sense of curiosity on the basis of a certain interest in oriental aesthetics. Thus, the modelling schemata of many different shapes of traditional Chinese decorative images have become the main mode of expression in the three-dimensional translation of Xiangjin brocade.

3.2.2

Z-shaped model styling

In Xiangjin brocade decorative patterns, among compositions of picture space forms, the most representative is vertical folding, that is, the “Z” shape. From the spatial point of view, the clear broken branches and lines play a key role in creating the picture structure, and the painter sets up the basic spatial structure of the picture through the method of image position management. The special abstract representation of the image divides the space into upper and lower parts, showing the characteristics of three-dimensional space, and the turning point is the point of the division of heaven and earth. The string branch type is maily used to carry out folding, with the folding place being the branch intersection decorated with a flower, branch and leaf scattered point arrangement. When the composition has the folded branch arrangement, the skeleton has obvious pattern characteristics. The demand of the consumer market determines that the basic feature of silk brocade is “daily” or “civilian”, which leads to the “stylised” expression of silk brocade plastic art. It is prominently shown in the modelling of “landscape, flower-and-bird painting”, “figure” and “landscape architecture”. Stylized modelling creates a sense of novelty on the basis of ensuring oriental aesthetic taste, which focuses on the Z-shaped styling of Xiangjin, the auspicious character mode;ling of “icing on the cake”, and the realistic modelling of the red art motif.

The first category: the decorative shape of the combination pattern. The Xiangjin brocade pattern decoration is represented by the use of adding and combining modelling techniques to form a compound pattern combination by adding or deleting decorative pattern elements according to the design requirements. As shown in Figure 8a, b, c, d, the overall composition structure of flower-and-bird painting is arranged in the form of “Z”, “small lining” and “dot, line and surface”. In particular, Figure 4c adopts the same kind of decorative pattern and a glyph combination of multiple flower heads at the same time, and it is surrounded by a series of branches, with the local intercept and interspersed combinations pushing out the spatial structure layer by layer. Under the intertwined branches, there is a theme pattern, deer, birds, cranes, etc., or the arrangement of a “one or two gathering” (flowers and birds are like two birds on a branch and a finch on the ground), or “single” (there is only one eagle and peony in the brocade of flowers and birds) or “double” (there are two magpies resting on the branches in the main picture), where the branches and leaves of flowers can be scattered and swayed, and can also form irregular geometry, which is in obvious contrast to the combination of animals, flowers and birds in the main picture.

The second category: “icing on the cake” decorative modelling. It applies patterns on the surface of the theme patterns to enhance the sense of decoration. This kind of decorative modeling is prominently shown in the direct use of Chinese characters as patterns, as shown in Figure 9a, showing the colourful Xiangjin brocade of “auspicious double happiness” and “eight immortal characters” produced by Du Jinsheng in the 1960s. The composition form and pattern of embedded words have been around for a long time. People often embed single or more words with beautiful meaning in the pattern, yet the text does not appear alone as a decorative pattern, but as a central pattern arranged between various flower patterns. Among the most commonly used traditional patterns are phoenixes, fish, peonies, plums, bamboo, chrysanthemums and auspiciousness, which are together woven into Xiangjin brocade, symbolising peace, prosperity and happiness, creating a festive atmosphere.

Fig. 9

Figures 9a and 9b show the character “Shou” of eight Immortals. In the hollow words of “Shou” in block letters, there are eight immortals, namely Tieguai Li, Zhang Guolao, Lu Dongbin, Han Xianzi, Cao Guojie, Han Zhongli, He Xiangu and Lan Caizhu. The meaning of the eight Immortals is double as it refers to the combination of the mythological characters of the eight Immortals and the auspicious meaning of “Shou” to express good will in celebrating birthdays. In Xiangjin brocade, 15 kinds of coloured silk lines are used to show the chic and vivid posture of different characters,; the patterns are colourful, bright, delicate and round, and the whole picture is smooth and stable, with “longevity” and “immortality” condensed into one. With its double meaning it is a noble gift for a birthday ceremony. Figures 9c, d & e are framed with a “Fu” character and decorated with animal patterns, such as pigs, sheep, rabbits, chickens, tigers, as well as fairy peach and plant patterns, all of which are consistent with the meaning of the longevity peach, representing immortality in Chinese culture.

3.2.3

Realistic modelling of decorative motif

Among the patterns selected by Xiangjin brocade, there are many shapes with the coexistence of realism and decorative features, reflecting the ingenious integration of the two styles. As shown in Figure 10, cigarette painting is a kind of gift that is placed in a cigarette box. It not only shows the high quality of cigarettes, but also reflects the high social status and elegant demeanor of smokers. Spreading from foreign countries to China, cigarette paintings take silk Xiangjin brocade as a medium to propagandise western portrait art. Xiangjin brocade miniaturises large western representative art works into silk works with a range of 10 cm, which is filled with oriental romance and mysterious artistic conception and meets western people's desire to seek Oriental verve. Nowadays, there exist very few Chinese cigarette painting brocades, and thus they have very high research and collection value. The author was very lucky to take photos of 4 pieces of cigarette painting brocades in the Suzhou Chinese Silk Archives which were donated by Suzhou Tian-ao Special Fabric Co., Ltd. As Figure 10 shows, all those cigarette painting brocades are a 11 cm x 15.5 cm rectangle whose bottom parts are printed with “Arti Grafiche Ricordi Milano Edizioni Beatrice d'Este-printed in Italy”. The images were taken from London and reprinted in Italy, and their colours were separated, doubled, overprinted, and neatened with the utilisation of professional dyestuff and screen printing.

Fig. 10

Inheriting the main colours of Chinese traditional brocade, Xiangjin brocade is often coloured with warm colours like red, yellow, and green [27]. Unlike the quiet, elegant and simple style of traditional Chinese brocade, it uses gorgeous, rich, and chunky colours to reflect its strong and unrestrained artistic features. Regarding colour matching skills, it employs traditional “color change” skills to make the picture natural, harmonious and unified, while reducing the visual stimulation that chunky colour produces. The use of warm colour with black, white, and gray fully reflects the aesthetic concept of integrity, truth, and beauty. As shown in Figure 11, Xiangjin brocade composition is flexible and vivid, for it combines cavalier perspective and focus perspective together to depict auxiliary objects, such as flowers and birds, at a fine-grained level, with the theme pattern occupying the central position. Doing so, the whole picture is orderly and harmoniously arranged, forming a unified art space.

Fig. 11

Xiangjin brocade is one of the representatives of innovative products in the silk industry. For example, dragons, phoenixes, lotuses, pines, and deer in the works represent people's desire to pursue fame, fortune, and happiness. As shown in Figure 12, the oriental features of Xiangjin brocade are closely related to Asian people's elegant and restrained aesthetic psychology, therefore symbolism is often employed to achieve a unified effect of sentiment, scenery, and meaning. The use of jacquard can weave points of different colours and lightness into brocade, making the colours soft and comfortable. As for expression techniques, Xiangjin brocade is processed on the basis of photographic negatives, therefore it integrates beautiful silk brocade and life-like landscape painting into one, with double artistic effects and realistic style. As a consequence, Xiangjin brocade is not only an ornament but also a cultural symbol, showing the public's concern for prosperity, wealth, and a bright future. Thus, it is endowed with the profound cultural psychology of the Oriental nations and has become an important symbol of Eastern cultures.

Fig. 12

As a pioneer of mechanised and large-scale production in the modern brocade industry in China, Xiangjin brocade took the lead in the innovation of traditional brocade in key processes such as craftsmanship, design and jacquard, and opened up a new era of brocade, from manual weaving to industrial manufacture [22]. From the colouring process of black-white brocade to the mixed-color process of traditional halo brocade, Xiangjin brocade has finally achieved the goal of attaining the tranquility and elegance of traditional ink and blue paintings [28]. Practical Xiangjin brocade adopts daily-use technology to successively weave some daily necessities such as blankets, cushions, bedspreads, and handbags.

From the analysis above, we come to the conclusion that the unique nature of Xiangjin brocade is the following: First of all, there is the three-dimensional design of the Xiangjin brocade pattern, which absorbs the structure of the two longitude and multi-latitude of Song Jin and the organisation of the warp break of Yunjin and Shujin, with the weft line being able to reach more than 30 levels at most. This makes the visual art of Xiangjin brocade more three-dimensional and hierarchical in terms of the clarity and texture of the changes in visual art. In addition, Xiangjin brocade uses middle transition colour, which makes the fabric colour effect natural, with the colour level changing from light to dark in 32 levels. In addition, Xiangjin brocade uses advertising pigment drawing, sassafras, kneading and other techniques on the basis of black and white to increase the thickness of the fabric, which cannot be reflected by other tapestry art. Secondly, Xiangjin brocade colour diversity design inherits the most valuable category of Song Jin in the Ming and Qing dynasties - the excellent tradition of heavy brocade to develop the organisation method of semi-silk, which can show flowers with warp silk, weft silk and mixed weft and warp with more brilliant colour. Xiangjin brocade weaves various colour patterns which cannot be expressed by manual embroidery. Finally, Xiangjin brocade displays different colour art and visual art through different materials, such as cotton, natural and synthetic fibre, as wel as through fabric structure changes to reflect the pattern mechanism and pattern colour effect, which is very different from traditional tapestry.

Since brocade relies on shadow tissue to sketch a three-dimensional image of a landscape, its structure becomes particularly important. Xiangjin brocade often adopts a two-warp and multi-weft structure, and the number of wefts is sometimes more than 15. Most brocades adopt the shadow-light method, where the satin texture gradually transits from the warp satin texture to a shadow produced by it; thus, the objects' layers, distance, dark side, and sun side can be three-dimensionally realised. The texture of black-white Xiangjin brocade is composed of one group of white warps and two groups of wefts, belonging to a one-warp and two-weft fabric structure. The white warps and wefts constitute a re-flattening of the ground structure, while the other group of black wefts utilises the change of satin texture to show the pattern on the ground structure. The shadow tissue method is used to change the flower structure on the basis of the ground structure to show the layers of brocade. The changes of flower structure mainly include a polka-dot satin schlieren texture (Figure 13a), half-dot satin schlieren texture (Figure 13b), and a combination of the polka-dot and half-dot satin schlieren textures (Figure 13c).

Fig. 13

Among them, in the half-dot satin schlieren texture, the blended colour (grey) is produced by the co-occurrence of black and white wefts on the fabric surface. To compensate for the uneven stiffness transition of the polka-dot satin schlieren texture, the half-dot satin schlieren texture is often employed to achieve an even and gentle light effect in the process of image hierarchy transition. Thus, the shading structure of the half-satin pattern is seldom used, except for showing the dark handover line of the figures' facial expression.

Artisan drawing has absorbed Song brocade's “two-warp and multi-weft” weaving structure and Yun brocade's “cross-stitch knotting” weaving technique, and Xiangjin brocade is equivalent to any other handmade brocade and k'o-ssu brocade in terms of pattern organisation and level changes. Artisan drawing design, known as the “soul of brocade”, plays a key role in the reproduction of brocade pattern into brocade products. Different weaving techniques have different warp and weft densities. The unique formula of Xiangjin brocade's artisan drawing for counting the number of warps and wefts is “total number of warps = width×warp density” and “total number of wefts = height×weft density”.

The craftsman's drawing is depicted in various colours on the craftsman's paper, which is an indication of the pattern structure. In the craftsman's drawing, the vertical direction of the grid indicates that several stripes are used in the lattice, that is, there are several horizontal columns in the normal case of yarn cushioning, and the horizontal indicates the needle distance. The longitude represents the number of jacquard yarns lined with a lattice, which determines the density of the tissue and the mesh effect, and can concisely represent the jacquard effect of the fabric, with different colours representing the high and low position of the shift needle or shift jacquard guide needle, that is, the jacquard effect of the fabric.

It takes a lot of work to finish an artisan drawing. For example, to manually draw a black-white brocade with specifications of 27×40 cm will take 45 days for it has more than 2 million points. The specific steps are as follows in Figure 15:

Meanwhile, the author used a computer to draw parts of the artisan map according to the 8×12 cm paper. Figure 14 (a–f) shows details of a Kuan-yin Buddha's head, face, clothes, hand and foot.

Fig. 14

Fig. 15

Before the ginning process begins, the designer should mark the number of needles and holes that are not used on the sample paper, and if the sample board is not attached, it needs to be explained with words or drawings in order to roll the pattern board. The pattern board on the jacquard machine is a perforated cardboard that controls the rise and fall of warp yarns. The vertical needle corresponding to the hole in the grain plate and its associated warp are lifted, and the warp yarn on the vertical needle where there is no hole is located in the lower layer of the shed. The pattern board is changed for each weft on a single-acting jacquard machine. The rolling of the hole on the pattern plate is carried out according to the corresponding position of the promoted warp yarn in the craftsman's drawing. It takes at least 20 days to roll a 27×40 cm black-white silk Xiangjin brocade manually. It can be woven by machines after connecting every print pattern according to its number and colour order.

The jacquard of Xiangjin brocade is usually woven by a power loom equipped with a jacquard device, which is done by throwing hand shuttles manually [31]. It absorbs the strong points of Song brocade and Yun brocade and adopts the complex two-warp and multi-weft fabric structure. The rising wefts of woven brocade that belong to the weft rising group vary from 10 to 20 pieces. The Jacquard loom was revised to use a bar-hanging device which makes multiple warps pass through a flower loop under a single jacquard needle, creating 1864, 2200 and 2960 threads. In this way, large brocade can be woven. The loom adopts a 32-piece stick-knife device; due to the limited width of the jacquard machine, the effect of fabric pattern size is mainly improved by increasing the number of sticks and knives. At the same time, by changing the number of jacquard hangers, and the thickness of the warp and weft density, some new Xiangjin brocade pattern specifications can be derived. Therefore, by drawing a picture of Xiangjin brocade and making a pattern card, different varieties of brocade can be woven, which is another unique feature of brocade weaving technology.

Xiangjin Brocade combines the advantages of the traditional crafts of Songjin, Yunjin and Shujin Brocade together with jacquard technology to create a new brocade technology to form four new weaving methods. The first is the weft-winding method, which involves the shuttle box moving up and down alternately, making full use of the space of the shuttle box to weave multiple groups of wefts. The second is the disk weft method, in which the warp thread A, longitude thread B and multicolour weft thread are treated by winding respectively. Silk thread is then wound on the shuttle and woven in the direction fixed by the jacquard machine. 6–8 sets of shuttles are usually used, and the number of weft threads is fixed according to the woven pattern. The third is the weft throwing method, where the colour weft line is involved between the longitude and weft of the specified position in the weaving process. The fourth is the flower digging method, where the weaving process of the jacquard machine is used to load the middle colour weft lines needed by the pattern, and the color is divided into blocks, zones and segments according to the pattern. It is characterised by thinner warp lines and thicker colour weft lines, and the pattern forms a special texture effect through the changes of different thickness longitude and weft lines.

As an important aspect of folk art, Xiangjin's production, design and sales are closely related to the social life at the time. It truly records social scenes at the time, such as landscape culture, garden culture, architectural culture, folk culture, religious culture and so on, which has precious cultural value.