Embroidery Series of Zhu Da’s Paintings Lonely Bird

The embroiderer practiced innovation and flexible combination of techniques in this series of free-hand embroidery pieces, which are based on the paintings of the famous Ming-and-Qing painter Zhu Da (1626-ca. 1705). As a painter with strong personality who excelled especially in flower and bird painting, in which the painter “never pursued completeness but always end up with completeness based on his unrestrained brushwork and flooding emotions”.

The skillful combination of various techniques such as thickening stitches (shi zhen, 施针), full-and-broken-line stitches (xushi zhen, 虚实针) and neat stitches (qi zhen, 齐针) helped the artisan to vividly illustrate a lonely bird with a curled neck, a bent back, a rolled eye, one claw standing on the ground while the other in the air, an animal that might have been bullied but is still proud and unyielding, fully expressing the creator’s tough and adamant characters, lonely situation and disgust of the unfairness in society.