Day 4

We went to a couple gardens and temples today and honestly the names are starting to blur together. Lion this, dragon that; it's hard to remember and differentiate all the names. Suzhou is a pretty cool area but is a lot colder than Shanghai.

We also hit up the silk factory today since it's a famous place for silk production in china, and silk embroidery museum as well. Not surprisingly, the factory and museum tour were just another sales pitch to get us to buy stuff while we were there. The artwork at the museum was pretty fantastic though. I don't know how many people have tried embroidery or ever looked at the back of an embroidered piece, but it usually looks like a huge mess of loose threads and knots. Some of the pieces at the museum were double sided where each side had a different image and it required the artisan to use two needles at once and work using mirrors so she could see both sides at once. For the layman artist, it's a pain in the ass.

The styles ranged heavily though from stereotypical chinese fish and bamboo to photorealism and even abstract. It was amazing what they were able to recreate using a needle, a thread and about a billion hours of cheap labor. When you first look at some of them, they look like they were real photos and some others they even imitate the brush strokes of paintings like the Mona Lisa.

The tour guide that was leading us through the exhibits and even showing us the ladies embroidering on the spot explained all of this to us in perfect english. If I hadn't met him in the middle of china, I probably would have guessed his accent to be somewhere between the uk to australia. It was a bit off from those exactly, but I never would have guessed China. His name was Billy, although I'm sure that was just a name he chose to keep foreigners like me from saying 'hwat was that again?'. He looks pretty young and apparently is the same age as me, but after talking with him for a bit, I realized how we're worlds apart. He's married and has a 2 year old daughter at home. He went to a University here in China to study English like our tour guide for Shanghai. Although our tour guide only moonlights as a tour guide and his real job is a english translator professor at a University in his home town, thinking of going to a University to lead tourists through an embroidery factory would make any college kid back in the states to say 'fuck that'. While English majors in the states use it to be aspiring actors, what I get from both the of our guides is that they really enjoy using their degree in english to meet new and different people from a land of homogeneity.

Beyond the homogeneity of the people, it is rare to find something truly unique in a land that prides itself on being able to mass produce everything from happy meals to the shoes on your feet. One thing I've come to understand is that if you see something being sold here, there's one being sold just like it in a booth down the street. So when people tell you it's hand made and one of a kind, I'm more inclined to call bullshit. In the embroidery factory, the pieces of art are truly spectacular works of craftsmanship, which is why I call them artisans rather than artists, but when you walk past a hundred embroidered artworks, you begin to see there are far fewer designs that they have to pull from. I loved the 'kitten stalking a mantis' piece, but I saw at least 5 of them and each completely identical. I commented on this to Billy and asked him "Do the seamstresses ever get to choose what designs they get to make?" and he replied "Sometimes". While embroidery is creative art along with painting, sculpting and performance art, it seems to lose the creative side of it just like any other 'art' that becomes a job.

After talking to Billy some more, apparently only one person gets to decide which designs get created at the embroidery factory. He/she basically just compiles a bunch of images they think would be cool/sell well and sends them to the factory to get them made. From a creative bias, I don't think that's a great idea to limit any creative input to one person with an internet connection. Although the artworks made aren't embroidered stock photography, they're not far from it. I don't think anyone's gonna want to drop a grand on an embroidered reproduction of Starry Night or Monet's Waterlilies. It's like buying Kidz Bop instead of the real album. But maybe that's part of the genius of China. Not only being able to copy Kidz Bop albums and sell them on the streets for the price they're worth but being able to emulate everything there is with such a precision that everyone else says 'fuck it'.