I was wondering about a thing or two after I wrote the previous post on Xiang Yang, so I talked to gallerist Shelley Spector.
The show included 72 pieces, and the images come out of popular magazines and other pop culture sources. If the tension on the threads is uneven, they will sag or pull, so Xiang stays focused on each piece until it is completed. Some of the pieces take four of five days (and he does eat and sleep; he just doesn’t switch to another project or put the project aside).
I had been thinking about how this was such labor-intensive work, and that the lunch bowls and embroidery made me of all the factory workers in China manufacturing clothes.
Xiang, a native of China (he earned his bachelor’s degree in painting and mural painting and his master’s in art criticismm, there), now hails from South Philadelphia. He still doesn’t speak English. “He brings a translator with him, usually his wife,” Spector said.
