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TAKING SILK

TAKING SILK

November 5, 2022
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Image: Women checking silk, Song, China. 

Dr. Angela Sheng is a textile scholar with a PhD in Oriental Studies— with fields in Chinese art history, the history of Chinese science and technology, and symbolic anthropology  —from the University of Pennsylvania; and technical training in textile arts from RISD, the Centre d’Etudes des Textiles Anciens in Lyon, and Skolen for Brugskunst in Copenhagen.

She began her academic career at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, first as Curatorial Fellow and then Assistant Curator, in charge of Asian textiles. After ROM, she taught at universities in Taiwan and Japan, and at McGill in Canada, before taking up post as Associate Professor at McMaster University. 

Image: Chinese, Taoist priest’s robe, 18th century. Gift of Miss Lucy Aldrich. Courtesy of the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design. 

She has worked extensively as a consultant in cross-cultural communications with clients in both Asia and Canada. 

She reads costumes and textiles both as functional art and as documentation of human negotiation with others and with time, place, and space.

She began working on interculturality along the Silk Road when she joined the 1996-98 Luce-funded 'Reuniting the Treasures of Turfan', organised by Yale and Beijing Universities. Her involvement with the project led to many publications. From 2005 to 2008, she worked on the touring exhibit and catalogue, Writing with Threads: Traditional Textiles of Southwest Chinese Minorities, based on the collection at Evergrand Museum in Taiwan, and organised by the University of Hawai’i Art Gallery.

In 2007, she began studying Inuit art and material culture, forming comparisons with those of selected Chinese minorities. She is working on a major long-term project on interculturality, memory, and meaning that 

She began working on Interculturality along the Silk Road when she joined the 1996-98 Luce-funded ‘Reuniting the Treasures of Turfan’, organized by Yale and Beijing Universities. Her involvement in the project led to many publications.

From 2005 to 2008, she worked on the touring exhibition and catalogue, Writing with Threads: Traditional Textiles of Southwest Chinese Minorities, based on the collection at Evergrand Museum in Taiwan and organized by the University of Hawai’i Art Gallery. In 2007, she began studying Inuit art and material culture, forming comparisons with those of selected Chinese minorities. 

Image: Tax and credit among Mongolian silk traders. © Sonia Halliday Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo

She reads costumes and textiles both as functional art and as documentation of human negotiation with others and with time, place, and space. Her research interests lie in intercultural transmission of art and technology in border areas between China and the agro-pastoralist zones to China’s north; nomadic contributions to knowledge transmission; and visuality and materiality— in particular, pluralistic representations and multi-faceted meanings.

Image: Marco Polo's route on China's silk road. Courtesy of history.com

She is working on a major long-term project on interculturality, memory, and meaning that includes a book manuscript.

She will also be lending her expertise to a SELVEDGE panel discussion of all things silk, on 9 November, 2022. We look forward to benefitting from her wisdom.

 

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