3. Silk Tapestry Kesi
Chinese silk tapestry is a type of handwoven textile which employs a weaving technique known as tongjing duanwei (‘continuous warp and broken weft’). Warp threads are first stretched onto a wooden loom and then weavers use a shuttle to carry polychrome weft threads across the warp—not the entire textile—leaving a subtle space between the colours. Such a distinctive appearance is thought to resemble cut or carved silk.
Basic weaving techniques
Developed by generations of weavers, the primary techniques include gou (‘connecting’) for defining the silhouette of patterns, along with guan (‘flinging’), jie (‘knotting’) and qiang (‘propping’). Each technique employs similar tones of polychrome wefts to achieve a gradation of colours.
gou (‘connecting’)
Wefts that differ from the colour of the subject motif are used to outline the motif’s silhouette.
guan (‘flinging’)
Two or more similar tones of coloured wefts follow the silhouette of the patterns. Wefts of each coloured block often appear to pile up in layers.
qiang (‘propping’)
Two or more coloured wefts woven together to create shading; in this technique, one coloured block abuts or ‘props’ up the other.
jie (‘knotting’)
Two or three similarly coloured wefts with varying degrees of brightness create adjacent lines of colour ranging from light to dark. The subtle shading effect in the scrolling clouds seen below was achieved using the jie (‘knotting’) technique.
