The following article was written during my three-month Artist's Exchange at the Tatter Blue Textile Library earlier this year. I hoped to highlight a few of the exceptional books that spoke to me, the connections I found between their pages, and the journey it took me on. The Tatter Blue Library opened its doors in 2017 and is home to over 6,000 books, journals, exhibition catalogues, and objects that examine and celebrate the global history, traditions, makers, craft and beauty of textiles.
_
At any moment in my childhood home, you could walk down the hallway and hear all at once the sounds of the violin, cello, and pipa emanating from the doors. While my classical music-loving mother brought us up in these sonorous pursuits, my discovery of clothing was quieter. Growing up in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, I discovered fashion by perusing the racks at Salvation Army, reading fashion magazines, and browsing my local Jo-Anns. I didn’t feel like I fit in, as perhaps many teenagers feel, and felt that I could express that difference in the way I dressed. My discovery of clothing felt like a different type of performance, one apart from my family’s preoccupation. Facing outwards, clothing could communicate my desired identity without speaking a word. Facing inwards, clothing was an intimate, daily relationship. These layers of experience inherent in dressing, public/private, near/far, continue to attract me to this day.
Age 14 with a wall full of fashion magazine clippings.
Ten years later when I started my own clothing brand, I sought to create a new language for how clothing could function; rethinking openings and closures, shapes that could transform, and ways that the wearer could interact and influence the garment. There is a coat without any buttons or zippers but closed by interlocking like puzzle pieces. There is a top, inspired by pillowcases, that has no opening for the neck but rather overlapped layers of fabric that can be pulled apart. I started to see my clothing as a hidden language that the wearer learns. Once they understood how to “enter” my garments, they would never forget and it was a secret that only they knew.
Scale was another way that I experimented with creating a hidden language. My earliest memory of playing with scale was the first garment label I produced, a humble muslin-colored strip of fabric with my brand name “not” in almost impossibly small font. I will never forget the manufacturer's laugh when I brought in my design, who thought this was a joke. Why would a brand intentionally make their label too small to read? But pushing against the ostentation of branding was part of what I wanted to communicate.
For my 2018 collection, I created original prints from nitrile rubber gloves I had begun collecting from hardware stores around the world. Print designer and artist Maggie Sampson and I started taking detail shots and scanning the unusual textures of these gloves. I was amazed at how abstract the gloves became when blown out of scale. One pale yellow knit glove with a deep green wrinkled rubber palm became a print that looked like an aerial landscape of lush forest land. A plump orange knit glove with a thin honeycomb-web of rubber produced a pattern that elicited gustatory guesses of fries and spaghetti. I enjoyed thinking that only the wearer of our designs knew the source of the patterns.
A nitrile rubber glove lying on a digitally printed denim fabric in a pattern derived from the glove.
I fell in love the first time I saw a katazome stencil in a museum in Copenhagen. Not knowing what I was looking at, I peered in as close as I could to examine the infinitely fine cut paper that resembled pine needles fallen on a forest floor, or twigs that had landed on the surface of a lake. From afar, the artwork blended into a soft haze, and the detail was not apparent until you leaned in. With my nose against the glass, I noticed that the finely cut paper was held together by an even finer thread mesh; and only upon reading the label did I learn that this impossibly fragile looking artwork was actually a stencil for dyeing fabric.
Five years later, I found myself in Tokyo and made my way to Tomita Dye Craft, a workshop that has been dyeing katazome for 110 years. Here was where I first laid eyes on komon stencils, the smallest kind of katagami stencil, made with a miniature drill called kiri which creates tiny circular holes. These intricate stippled patterns, typically printed in subdued browns, blues, or grays, would dissolve into a uniform color from afar but upon close examination revealed delightful shapes and imagery. I was absolutely captivated by how these little dots could say one thing from afar and another close up. Within these dots, a whole world seemed to open up, telling stories about the culture, language, beliefs, and daily lives of the wearer.
Two years later, I found myself at Tatter Blue Textile Library in Brooklyn on an artist’s exchange. Amongst exploring many different topics within the library, I was eager to discover that Tatter had a selection of books on katazome. Katagami Katazome Paper Stencils: Yoshioka Collection was a catalogue of stencils, satisfyingly organized by scale as you flipped through, and in Carved Paper – The Art of the Japanese Stencil, I particularly enjoyed photos of the making of the stencils, with detailed photos of the carving process and mounting of silk mesh.
In my readings, I focused my attention on the tiniest komon patterns to understand who wore them and how they developed. By the late 16th century, komon stencils were being used on the formal garments worn by the samurai. Due to strict Edo period sumptuary laws dictating what every rank could wear, the samurai were not allowed to wear anything too flashy. Although their kimonos may have looked subdued from afar, the komon fabrics were particularly expensive due to the skill and labor involved. The competitive taste for extremely fine patterns led to patterns being formally graded according to their size, with the “shagreen” sharkskin design being the finest.
Competition between the powerful feudal landowner families, daimyos, led to the increasing miniaturization of these patterns. Some daimyo families adopted specific patterns which became exclusive patterns that could identify different clans. The average commoner couldn’t choose from expensive fabrics, elaborate shibori, or gold and silver embroidery, so instead they created their own komon motifs. Humorous and whimsical motifs from daily life like tobacco pouches, radishes, or haircombs can be seen in their designs. I relished in the sense of rebelliousness inherent in wearing these patterns, each class rebelling against the restrictions of dress in some way or another.
I find myself drawn to the katagami for various reasons. The stencils are artworks in themselves, perhaps evidenced by the fact that they have far outlived the fabrics they dye in the collections of museums and private collectors. I can study these stencils through the lens of an art student: there is a balance of positive and negative space, a combination of abstract and formalized elements, sense of depth, and playing with orientation and scale. I also love the irregularity within the “strokes”; straight and curved lines shift in and out with different thicknesses, giving an inherent sense of movement. Stencils would sometimes imitate the look of other dye techniques, such as shibori or ikat, and within that purposeful irregularity, I saw flickering light or pulsating waves. To me, there was a powerful connection to nature.
One of the great joys of being in Tatter’s library is finding the connections between the pages of books of different subjects. While perusing books on the patterns found in nature, I came upon a treasure: Micro Art, a hefty volume displaying a new art form – photos taken through the microscope. The book is delightfully divided into the categories of Vegetable (Douglas firs and green algae), Animal (Angora rabbit hair and pigeon esophagus), Mineral (cholesterol ester and chromium nickel), and Familiar Objects (staples, down feather). I was blown away by the patterns, colors, and textures in nature revealed to me through the microscopic photo.
A microscopic photo from a hard maple tree from the book Micro Art.
Here, a photo of hard maple seen at 315x strongly evoked for me the circular patterns created by the kiri drill. The hairy, flickering tendrils of cholesterol ester seen at 500x reminded me of the blurry bleeding edges of patterns imitating ikat. A stencil of curved stripes evoking water ripples brought to mind needle-formed pleating I had been looking at recently in another book in my studio, The Art of Manipulating Fabric.
It seemed to make sense to me that these two hidden worlds, katagami and nature at the microscopic level, would speak to each other.
I asked a Japanese colleague to help me decode the cultural significance of a few komen motifs and discovered that a particular angular motif represented kites, an auspicious symbol in Japanese culture. This connected me to a book called Pictures for the Sky: Art Kites, a catalogue of a 1987 project where Goethe Institute of Osaka invited 100 international artists to create artworks for kites which Japanese kite-makers then transformed into airborne objects. From looking at a few small dots in the komen designs, I then found myself imagining kites that reached up to 12 feet wide. However, once the kite reached the air, one of the artists Yukio Imamura hoped for theirs to “simply become a tiny point and be swallowed up in the infinite expanse of the cosmos.” Scale was malleable and mysterious.
In studio, I tried my hand at creating my own patterns. I am a drawer and sketcher and am accustomed to thinking through drawing and writing. But thinking through “pattern-creation” is very new to me. During the slow process of stippling, many things came to mind - of molecules pushing outwards like in water or air, and the meditative action of prayer beads. I wanted to explore this quality of being able to be read and to disappear and the connections between the patterns seen and unseen in our world. I started thinking about which messages are hidden, where we may hide them on our bodies, and what forms these could take. What do we know that no one else knows? How can playing with scale further acknowledge the intimate relationship we have with the cloth on our bodies? With these thoughts, and the connections between pages swirling in my mind, I pick up my marker.
A selection of Lai's pattern explorations in studio.