About Silk: Ai Weiwei x Rubelli

For a material so intimately bound to the histories of power, trade, and empire, silk has always been more than fabric. It has been currency, diplomacy, and desire, a fibre that connected China to Venice along routes whose significance was never purely commercial. It is this layered inheritance that Ai Weiwei draws upon in About Silk, a site-specific installation created with Venetian textile house Rubelli, currently on view at their Milan showroom through May.

The centrepiece is a silk lampas — a richly patterned, multi-layered woven fabric — of exceptional technical ambition. Rubelli's weavers at their Como mill built the cloth on a warp of 9,600 threads in deep red and golden yellow, interlacing five distinct wefts at 130 picks per centimetre to achieve something close to photographic clarity in silk...

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Image Credits:

All images: Rubelli x Ai Weiwei, About Silk. Photography: @claudiazalla