Touched by Indigo - Royal Ontario Museum
Touched by Indigo - Royal Ontario Museum
Touched by Indigo - Royal Ontario Museum
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1<br />
While the technique must have<br />
suffered considerably in areas situated<br />
close to the central administration,<br />
fortunately it continued to<br />
flourish in areas under the rule of the<br />
Liao and Xixia, two barbarian political<br />
powers that co-existed with the<br />
Song and were located to the north<br />
and west of China.8 During the Ming<br />
and early Qing periods, although the<br />
technique was still practised, it seemed to be confined to certain<br />
areas. The multicoloured clamp-resist-dyed<br />
fabrics manufactured were mainly used for<br />
covering tankas (religious paintings). Many<br />
of them are still preserved in Tibet.9<br />
A serious lack of records and extant<br />
examples after the early Qing led many<br />
twentieth-century Chinese textile scholars<br />
to assume that clamp-resist dyeing had<br />
completely died out. Fortunately, though,<br />
during the latter half of the 1980s, it<br />
became known that the technique was<br />
actually still alive in southern Zhejiang<br />
province, in particular, in rural areas around the coastal cities of<br />
Wenzhou and Taizhou. The modern product, however, is quite different<br />
from those manufactured in the preceding periods. Instead of<br />
multicoloured repeat patterns dyed all<br />
over a luxurious silk fabric, it has now<br />
changed to a monochromatic assemblage<br />
of individual linear designs dyed<br />
on cotton, a utilitarian fibre. Instead of<br />
serving multi-purposes, it is now primarily<br />
used for making quilt covers.<br />
The modern technique involves essentially cleaning and marking<br />
of a length of handwoven cotton (10m long and 25 cm wide);<br />
wrapping it in accordion fashion around a set of seventeen engraved<br />
woodblocks, with each block being positioned one on top of the<br />
other; setting a metal or wooden clamp in place to tighten the stack<br />
of cloth-wrapped woodblocks at both ends; and<br />
placing the whole apparatus in an indigo dye bath<br />
for twenty-five minutes before lifting it out for<br />
five minutes to bring about oxidation. The actual<br />
dyeing needs to be repeated four times to reach<br />
optimum intensity of the blue colour.10<br />
A design is made up of outlines cut in deep<br />
and wide grooves on the surface of a woodblock.<br />
These grooves are mostly interconnected to allow<br />
the indigo dye to flow through from several small<br />
holes made on one long edge of the woodblock.<br />
Because the relief lines and surfaces of the woodblocks<br />
are clamped together firmly, the cotton<br />
sandwiched tightly between does not come into<br />
contact with the dye and remains white. After dyeing,<br />
washing, and sun-drying, the long strip is cut into four strips of<br />
equal length and sewn together to make a large<br />
rectangular piece, ready to be used as the top<br />
of a quilt cover.<br />
For various reasons, such as the labourintensive<br />
and time-consuming nature of both<br />
the preparation of the raw materials and the<br />
dyeing process, changing social values,<br />
and unfavourable marketing prospects,<br />
there is hardly any demand for clampresist-dyed<br />
products nowadays. In the<br />
area around Wenzhou woodblock<br />
engravers and dyers have closed shop<br />
35