“Metamorphis, the Collaboration Between Photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Suzhou Embroiderers“
Since 1986 noted nature photographer and environmental activist Robert Glenn Ketchum has collaborated with Master Embroiderer Meifang Zhang to create embroideries based on his photographs. As Director of the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute (SERI) and then founder of the Suzhou Embroidery Art Innovation Center (SEAIC), Meifang Zhang occupies a prominent place in the development of Chinese traditional embroidery. The works in this exhibition are some of the latest pieces created in that collaboration. Zhang says, “Robert is bringing forth new ideas in every work of his photographic art, unbroken transformations, unbroken emergence of new features. How can our embroidery take the features of photographic works, adopt the embroiderers’ best vocabulary, our colors, our needlework, our methods regarding the relationship of full and empty, to express those pieces in the best way?“ Since the first small, tentative steps in the collaboration, Ketchum’s enthusiasm, confidence and knowledge have combined with Zhang’s skill, persistence and insight to create a stunning new embroidery that represents at once the retention and growth of tradition.
From a conversation with Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong, Meifang Zhang said, “You can’t repeat tradition… repeat, repeat… at the foundation of the tradition there’s no development, no raising up, no advance, so you’re just at zero.” You can say the tradition of Chinese embroidery begins about a thousand years ago when court painters began to collaborate with court embroiderers, a collaboration that lent embroidery the prestige it continues to enjoy to the present day. Collaboration remains an important part of the tradition, “I also collaborate with different artists. I feel all have different influences, and each artist’s collaboration has its own characteristics. In the collaboration with Robert, one characteristic is that he is an American artist, the rational concepts of an American artist’s art matured on American soil, right? First, the colors of his photographic art as I’ve said has a forceful impact, because the colors of his image are a great change from the colors of traditional embroidery. In this process, how to combine my embroidery with photography art? Much of the embroidery in the exhibition uses random- stitch embroidery. Developed in the late nineteenth century, the use of stitches which vary in direction, length and color allows the artists to build up layers of shading which traditional embroidery, made up of dense areas of parallel stitches or knots, could not achieve. Practiced almost exclusively in Suzhou, random stitch embroidery is an early example of the ways that tradition has grown in Suzhou.
