Working through culture: a drawing practice with an old apron

Abstract

Through narrating an encounter with an elderly woman in the so-called Nüshu region, I aim to show how her chants and her old apron in particular have inspired my creative drawing work. Nüshu, or women's script, is believed to be created and practiced by women in a small and remote region in China. The exclusive use of Nüshu among women for generations suggests that some women were able to create their own means of communication despite being deprived of formal education. With Nüshu, they were able to develop a tradition of storytelling, orally in chants, in embroidery work and in written form, telling their own stories forgotten in conventionally recorded history. Interwoven with an account of my drawing practice in line with the visual and audio documentations collected in my visits to the region, the writing exemplifies how an ordinary woman through her practice could constitute an object of ethnology. It is an attempt to open up a dialogue connecting women in the practice of chanting, embroidering, writing and drawing, across cultures, space and time. The work, articulated in a repetitive and fragmentary manner, is between theory and fiction, and acts to interrupt the linear tradition of recorded history and explore a fluid practice of writing.

Keywords:

• Nüshu
• women's script
• artefact
• women
• visual arts
• trace
• memory

Notes on contributor

Yuen-yi Lo is an artist, writer and lecturer based in Macau and Hong Kong. Her creative work concerns scripto-visual communication. She has contributed writings to the areas of art and culture, feminism and oral history. She is currently teaching visual arts in the Faculty of Education, University of Macau.

Notes

1. The indented refers to my experience of drawing the apron at the studio. The apron has offered a site of experiences and relations; the text aims to cover how my working with and through it has gone through a development of boundless change.