University Honors

Within the Chinese American community, the art of embroidery is often valued as a way of forging one’s connections with Chinese history and culture. As a form of traditional textile craftsmanship, the knowledge of embroidery is often passed down through generations within a family. How does the act of creating a work of embroidery–which is, afterall, simply a piece of cloth–instigate the process of constructing one’s lineage and cultural identity? This project investigates the various aspects of embroidery–its technique, materiality, and design–in order to understand how the embroiderer’s choices in the process of embroidering dictates and shapes the meaning of the resulting work. The Chinese American embroiderer often chooses the type of stitch, material of the fabric, and the pattern to create an artwork with the specific intentions of portraying and constructing one’s own cultural identity. In this project, I demonstrated the power of embroidery and captured its cultural significance by creating my own work of embroidery. In doing so, this project demonstrated how it can be worthwhile to analyze the technical and material details of an embroidered cloth congruently as a way to understand this art medium’s power to preserve the embroiderer’s intergenerational memories and cultural identity.