Jiaxuan Fu is a textile designer and specialises in weaving. She comes from a traditional handcraft family in the southwest of China. Her family makes brocade for wall hangings using a hand-manipulated supplementary weft technique that originated 2,000 years ago.
It has always been her intention to pass on her family's heritage and to innovate it with her own interpretations alongside her passion for digital coding. She is thinking of applying these innovations to fashion and the body.
Jiaxuan always feels the battle between handcrafts and technology. How traditional handcrafts would be developed in terms of contemporary art and technology? Where is the future of endangered craft?
This project aims to explore the language of digital coding and how she has used it to find her voice in weaving, combining western textiles culture and Tujia brocade of Chinese minority handcraft . By taking the code of weaving and comparing it to computer programming, she intends to incorporate computer science into the art and handcraft of weaving. Through this project, she is seeking a globally universal and equal dialogue through art and beauty.
A lot of her works came from the thinking of the relationship between herself, her family and the handcraft. She drew this vase she photographed of her mother's flower arrangements, and the grey scaled colour built the structure spontaneously.
In this process, she was inspired by Tom Ford and Paul Smith in terms of minimal, casual, organic and relaxed luxury. This helped her transform her work to a more contemporary style compared to her previous work.
Throughout this project, she has been thinking about the position of Tujia brocade in contemporary weaving. As Tujia brocade represents a narrative of the Tujia community, she believes that it has historical and humanistic value and should be preserved alongside modern production.
This is a pair of strokes, one and two, in Chinese calligraphy and a symbol of traditional heritage as there is an old Chinese saying ‘One life gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to all things’. And this saying represents the relationships between herself, her family and this handcraft.
