Intoxicated Poet with a Wine Pot

As one of few figure embroideries crafted at the later years of Lu Shuxian, this piece was based on an improvised artwork by the well-known modern Chinese painter Fan Zeng, which illustrates an intoxicated poet walking leisurely carrying a stick with a gourd-shaped wine pot tied to one of its end. Thanks to the artist’s masterful application of various techniques including long and short stitches (tao zhen, 套针), seeding stitches (dian zhen, 点针), inserted stitches (qian zhen, 嵌针), etc., the figure was portrayed to every detail, especially on the eye-brows which show vividly the intoxication of the figure.