Most Significant Research Publications
Writing with Threads (2009)
Reading Textiles (2020)
Knowledge Transmission (current project since 2016)
On colonization and indigeneity
2009 Writing with Threads: Traditional Textiles of Southwest Chinese Minorities. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Art Gallery.
As the principle curator of this travelling exhibit since 2005, I selected over 250 out of 20,000 artifacts, designed the themes of the exhibit, oversaw the translation of all articles translated from Chinese into English, edited the catalogue, and wrote an introductory essay, Reading Costumes as “Texts” and Decoding Ethnic Visual Culture of Southwest China (13-41).
It follows my synthesis of two key paradigms: Interculturality (T. Escobar 2003 and 2007) and “Enchantment of Technology” (A. Gell 1992). This theoretical synthesis allowed me to analyze the cultural integration of the dominant Han Chinese with the 15 studied minority groups, especially the Hmong, in terms of complexity in cut and construction, techniques of ornamentation, and motifs. As an example, I elaborated the intercultural integration of 7th century Sogdian and 2nd century BCE Chu (Mawangdui) influences in a Hmong woman’s ensemble from Yahui of Danzhai county in Guizhou province.
I also wrote “Notes on Textile Terms” from the perspective of a textile artisan (420-21).
On Chinese textile technology in the globalized Early Modern period
2018 “Why Velvet? Localized Textile Innovation in Ming China,” Chapter 2 in Threads of Global Desire: Silk in the Early Modern World, edited by Dagmar Schäfer, Giorgio Riello, and Luca Molà. Pasold Studies in Textile, Dress, and Fashion History (Suffolk, UK and Rochester, NY, USA: Boydell & Brewer): 49-74. The chapter explores the Chinese coastal response to the globalized maritime trade in the sixteenth century.
On gender and textile work
2013 “Women’s Work, Virtue and Social Space,” in a special issue on gender and technology of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM, Tübingen, Germany), 36: 9-38.
As the guest-editor of this issue, I wrote an introductory essay to showcase the three Art History articles that examine women textile artisans in late imperial China.
On “Silk Road” textiles
2020 “Reading Textiles: Transmission and Technology of Silk Road Textiles in the First Millennium,” A Companion to Textile Culture, edited by Jennifer Harris (Wiley-Blackwell): 109-26. This is a state-of-the field chapter, summarizing past scholarship and current trends.
2017 “Chinese Silks That Circulated Among Peoples North and West: Implications for Technological Exchange in Early Times?” Chapter 8 in Berit Hildebrandt (ed.) with Carole Gillis, Silk. Trade and Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxbow Books): 104-23.
This work re-assess our understanding of the development of complex weaves along the Silk Road among weavers of West Asia, Central Asia, and China in the first five centuries. It raises the possibility that weaving the double-cloth on a vertical loom in ancient Syria was the critical transition to the development of the more complex draw-looms in West Asia. Thus, it refines the hypothesis raised in 2006: “Textiles from Astana: Art, Technology, and Social Change” (in Central Asian Textiles and Their Contexts in the Early Middle Ages, Riggisberger Berichte 9, 117-27, edited by Regula Schorta. Riggisberg, Switzerland: Abegg Foundation). The 2006 work argues that intercultural exchange of artistic ideas led to the technological innovation of a prototype-drawloom, nearly one millennium before the western drawloom.
The 2006 article followed my research on Turfan from 1996 to 1998: “Innovations in Textile Techniques on China’s Northwest Frontier, 500 – 700 A.D.” (Asia Major, Third Series, 2, 11 (1998): 117-60). The 1998 work unravels the mystery of patronage for innovative textile design and reveals the requisite social conditions for successful intercultural transmission. Its analysis of ancient Iranian monumental murals corresponds with that of ancient Iranian miniscule seal engravings.
2012 “Determining the Value of Textiles in the Tang Dynasty In Memory of Professor Denis Twitchett (1925-2006),” in a special issue on Textiles as Money of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Series 3, 23, 2: 175-95.
This article shows in part the methodology of decoding textile artifacts for understanding the intercultural transmission of art and technology in general, and here specifically, on the use of textiles as money for taxation purposes.
2005 “From Stone to Silk: Intercultural Transformation of Funerary Furnishings Among the Asian Peoples around 475-650 CE,” in Les Sogdiens en Chine, 141-80, edited by Étienne de la Viassière and Éric Trombert, Paris: École Française d’Extrême Orient.
Using two theoretical paradigms of Interculturality and “Enchantment of Technology” (see above), this work shows how the Sogdian male elite re-interpreted the Han-Chinese funerary form while integrating their own cultural content to show status. The creative non-Han use of the Han Chinese funerary house led to yet another interpretation. Commissioning embroidered text and image on a silk “house,” Princess Tachibana in Japan invoked the memory of authority for the purpose of negotiating power. The article then proposes a new reconstruction of the composition of the oldest and fragmented embroidery in Japan, the Tenjukoku (heavenly kingdom) curtains.