The film crews of TV program "Treasures in My Hometown", which is affiliated to the Hunan TV channel's famous TV show "Progress everyday", entered Wenzhou this March and the amazing hair embroidery art was fully displayed in the program. At present, Wenzhou Museum has a collection of the outstanding hair embroidery work "Sun Yat-Sen", which was created by Wei Jingxian who has been called "Hair Embroidery Diplomat". From this piece of hair embroidery work, perhaps we can have a glimpse on the legendary story of Wenzhou's "Hair Embroidery Diplomacy."

 The hair embroidery work "Sun Yat-Sen" created by Wei Jingxian


Wei Jingxian

The history of Wenzhou Hair Embroidery

"The Eastern Artistic Stunt" constituted by needles and hairs

 Wenzhou Hair Embroidery is a provincial-level intangible cultural heritage project. It is also known as “The Five Embroideries” together with Hangzhou Embroidery, Ningbo Embroidery, Ou Embroidery, and Taizhou Embroidery. It is also one of the 24 regional embroidery species in China. The so-called hair embroidery is such an art that taking the natural-color human hairs as the materials and the needle as the tool to create artistic images on the flat fabrics by wielding the needle with adherence to the law of formative arts. Compared with ordinary floss embroidery, the hair embroidery is expressed by the natural-color hair, which makes the artistic images be more realistic and stereoscopic. Furthermore, it can be preserved for a long time with its unique artistic features.

"The Hair Embroidery Diplomacy" enhanced Wenzhou's Popularity

  Wenzhou Hair Embroidery works have been given to foreign leaders as gifts for many times and are well-accepted. For examples, a hair-embroidered portrait of the Queen of the Netherlands was presented to the Queen by an overseas Wenzhou-origin Chinese in April 1995. Wenzhou Hair Embroidery artist embroidered the portraits for Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto and the King and Queen of Nepal in 1996. They also were taken abroad by President Jiang Zemin as gifts during his visit to the four countries of South Asia in November 1996. The embroidery work “Yeltsin” was given to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a gift from President Jiang Zemin on June 6, 2002.

The present story

Wenzhou's first colored hair embroidery work

  At an accidental opportunity, Meng Yongguo met two female teachers from the Amsterdam Art Institute in the Netherlands. With his professional sensitivity, he felt that the blond hair of the two ladies must be good materials for hair embroidery. Later, with the help of his mentor Wei Jingxian, he got the blonde hairs. After six months of hard embroidering, the “Mona Lisa”, his first colored embroidery work, also the first colored embroidery work in Wenzhou, was successfully completed.

Innovation is the best way to inheriting the hair embroidery art

  After successfully creating the first colored embroidery work, Meng Yongguo continued to pick colored hair embroidery as his own research direction, which ushered in the diversified development of Wenzhou Hair Embroidery. Meng Yongguo profoundly felt that the traditional hair embroidery method was too simple to achieve the desired effect that he wanted during his creation of "Einstein". He tentatively applied the "disordered needle method" created by the modern embroidery craftsman Yang Shouyu into his hair embroidery work. Afterwards, Meng Yongguo created a new "bottom-color complement method" to make up for the limitations of the colored hair embroidery. In addition, he also innovated the tool of hair embroidery and improved the decoration method of the hair embroidery work.

  Meng Yongguo said that innovation is for better inheritance. Making innovations on the basis of inheriting the traditional hair embroidery skills, transforming the old parts fallen behind the times into new vibrant creations and reflecting the ever-changing parts of the times, that are what we need to do for continuing our traditional arts.

来源：温州晚报