2024 "Nanjing Week" opens in France, featuring its Yunjin brocade

The art exhibition "Brocade and Embroidery, a Fiber which Connects Us" opened at the Louvre Museum in Paris on October 24, local time, marking the beginning of a series of the China-France cultural exchanges during the "Nanjing Week". 

French First Lady Brigitte Macron visited the exhibition, showing great interest in the exquisite handicraft exhibits and acknowledging Nanjing's efforts in promoting Sino-French cultural exchanges.

The exhibition, held in conjunction with the International Cultural Heritage Fair, showcases a collection of Yunjin (Cloud Brocade) artifacts, Sino-Western fusion textiles, modern installation art, and more. Zhang Ming, the representative curator and a professor at Nanjing University of the Arts, said, "We formed a curatorial team with experts from the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation and Nanjing Open University, attempting to trace the development of art across cultures. Our aim is to break the traditional boundaries of handicrafts and explore ways to integrate the 'human-centered' design philosophy of Chinese traditional culture with modern lifestyles."

That evening, the exhibition was bustling with visitors. Highlights included a precious replica from Nanjing Yunjin Museum of China, couture dresses with over three million embroidery stitches, and a series of lighting installations that use modern design and crafts to showcase the aesthetics of traditional Chinese culture. The exhibition attracted representatives from various regions of France, the Chinese Embassy in France, and UNESCO, who stopped by to appreciate the displays. Many of the exhibits received praise from representatives of professional organizations such as the Chambres de Métiers et de l'Artisanat, the Académie d'Architecture and the Ateliers d'Art de France.

The showcased exhibits, which combine traditional Chinese handicrafts with a sense of fashion, garnered significant attention from many young attendees, who stopped to admire and take photos. Many visitors noted that, in an age dominated by machine weaving, it is rare to find such complete preservation of manual weaving, making the Yunjin handicrafts suitable as travel souvenirs. The displays of the traditional, diverse, and innovative aspects of Nanjing and China, tempted people to make them their next travel destinations.

In the run-up to the exhibition, Nanjing launched "Brocade and Embroidery," a program aimed at facilitating collaboration between international artists and Yunjin masters. Works from this program became significant highlights of the exhibition. Among them, Ugo Gattoni, a French illustrator and the official poster designer for the Paris Olympics, chose to use traditional weaving art to create his nearly eight-year personal project "Nebula", which depicts "the crossroads of stars," symbolizing the nature of encounters between people.

Renowned French designer Matali Crasset crafted a series of Yunjin works titled "MataliX", employing a vast contrast of colors to showcase clouds, light, water, and symbols of Nanjing, such as the Ming Dynasty City Wall and decorated boats on the Qinhuai River. Chinese independent designer and founder of the brand JACQUES WEI, Wei Donghui, created the "Jacques Wei X Velvet Flowers X Silk Flowers" piece to express themes of life's bloom and decay, and the passage of time across the four seasons.

At the event, Nanjing-born contemporary paper folding artist Huang Xiaoxian interacted with the audience by teaching a traditional Chinese method of folding a love letter shaped like "Tongxin Fangsheng" (two diagonally overlapping squares).

This "Brocade and Embroidery" series of events will also feature the "Dialogue of Craftsmanship" masters salon on October 27, inviting contemporary Chinese handicraft artisans and modern design artists from France to share practical cases and creative stories. Chen Cheng, an inheritor of the Nanjing Yunjin (Cloud Brocade) Loom and Weaving Skills intangible heritage, stated, "I look forward to integrating Yunjin with contemporary needs and modern trends to realize its industrialization and internationalization."

The 2024 "Nanjing Week" will also feature activities such as cultural exchanges and dialogues between two cities with the theme of the Silk Road, enhancing Sino-French friendship through mutual learning. As a culturally "go global" initiative of the Nanjing government, "Nanjing Week" has been held continuously since 2015, previously taking place in world-renowned cities such as Milan, London, and New York, staging over 100 events that have helped shape the international images of Nanjing and China.