Power Dressing: Chinese & Korean Textiles

Professor Jack Richards has been collecting embroidered Chinese and Korean robes for more than twenty years. Jolene Douglas, the museum’s exhibitions curator, has selected twenty garments from this Sydney based collection to create Power Dressing, an exhibition that demonstrates the extraordinary range and quality of Korean and Chinese textile makers and embroiderers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who continued to adhere to the traditions of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The intricacy of the embroidery will fascinate both experienced practitioners and those who aspire to such standards of excellence.

Dr Damian Skinner, exhibition curator, went to Sydney to consult with an expert on Asian textiles:

"The most interesting thing for me was working with Christina Sumner from the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and hearing her analyse the textiles from a formal point of view - what they are made of, how they were woven or embroidered. It was like a domestic CSI: all this hidden information coming to light. It was also interesting to find out more about the relationship between tradition and power, to spend time looking at and thinking about garments which are effectively symbolic representations of whole world views, a way of understanding how the universe is ordered."

Event listed by tairawhitimuseum

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