For example, Changsha-born artist Wang Ye, 32, studied both design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China and sculpture at Yale School of Art in the US. He is known for integrating traditional folk arts and crafts into his multi-media creations. The artist learned fishnet knitting techniques in his hometown and is learning Xiang embroidery, a millennia-old craft in his home province Hunan.

On display at the Beijing museum’s triennial are three pieces from Wang’s Embroidernity Series (2020)—Kazimir Malevich’s Woman with Pails: Dynamic Arrangement, Joan Miro’s Still Life with Old Shoe, and Meret Oppenheim’s sculpture Object, all in embroidery. When looking from afar, gallery-goers may first feel glad from the visual familiarity of those modernist masterpieces, and soon may start questioning why these works produced almost 100 years ago are at a contemporary art exhibition. Walking closer, they would examine the works in awe, marveling at the beautiful sheen and the meticulous needlework, which makes the gazelle fur covering the saucer and teacup in Oppenheim’s work seem almost real.

The artist underpinned the three pieces with a semi-fictional narrative through the perspective of a Xiang embroidery inheritor. Back in 1989, after returning home from an overseas product exposition, she remade the modernist works in the medium that she was best at, as an attempt to understand modernity. Marrying Xiang embroidery, a traditional medium known for motifs such as flowers, figures and animals, with new forms, Wang inspires the audience to rethink the concepts of “traditional” and “new”, “original” and “replica”, critics remarked.