Chinese Silk and Bamboo Fan with Cherry Blossom Motif

Description

Chinese silk bamboo fan, each rib a slender reed of Moso bamboo, the canopy a panel of hand-stretched raw silk. To hold it open is to understand why this form has been refined over two thousand years without revision.

The folding fan entered Chinese court life during the Han dynasty and was elevated through the Song and Ming periods into the form made today in the workshops of Hangzhou and Suzhou. Silk was selected not for beauty alone but for its tensile strength and the fineness of the weave, which allows pigment to settle into the surface without bleeding. The cherry blossom motif on this piece follows conventions established in Tang dynasty painting, where the flower marked the passage between cold and warmth, stasis and movement.

The fan measures 30 cm from pivot to tip when closed and opens to a span of 55 cm. The Moso bamboo ribs number twenty-four, each carved and sanded to a uniform 4 mm width and bound at the pivot with a brass ring that allows the fan to be opened and closed ten thousand times without loosening. The silk panel is hand-painted in three tones of pink and white over a pale celadon ground. The fan folds to a compact 30 cm baton. The pivot moves with the controlled resistance of aged lacquer, neither loose nor stiff.

Chinese folding fan. Material: Moso bamboo ribs, hand-stretched raw silk canopy. Motif: cherry blossom, hand-painted in mineral pigments. 24 ribs. Open span: 55 cm. Closed length: 30 cm. Handmade. Fair trade certified. Origin: Hangzhou/Suzhou, China.

A working object with a two-thousand-year lineage. Each fan is painted by a single artist. The silk holds its color for decades.