Silk Embroidery: A Tradition Reimagined
From Flying Lion to contemporary silk works

21st Jul 2015

Jacky Tsai began working with traditional Chinese silk embroidery in 2014, creating Flying Lion for his collaboration with Shanghai Tang on its twentieth anniversary. The work marked the beginning of an enduring exploration: how a Chinese craft with more than a thousand years of history could give new life to his contemporary imagery.

Working with skilled embroiderers, Tsai translates the detail and energy of his compositions into silk, stitch by stitch. The 2015 film below offers a closer look at this collaboration and the patient work behind the finished surfaces.

Flying Lion brought together fantastical animals, birds, flowers and floating lanterns in a composition made entirely in embroidery. Created for Shanghai Tang in 2014, it connected Tsai’s visual world with the brand’s celebration of Chinese culture. Seen in full, the work reads as an intricate scene; close up, individual stitches reveal the extraordinary labour and sensitivity within it.

Silk brings its own way of holding light. The direction, density and layering of the stitches shape each passage of colour, allowing a petal, a feather or a flowing line to shift as the viewer moves. What appears at a distance to be a painted surface resolves into thousands of individual marks made with thread. This quiet shimmer is central to the work’s presence.

The exploration continued through Floral Horse and Chinese Blossom, alongside the intricate floral imagery of Chinese Floral Skull. Across these works, familiar motifs acquire a different weight and luminosity in silk. The collaboration preserves the individuality of handwork while opening a new setting for it: contemporary artworks whose richness unfolds through looking closely.