On the afternoon of April 14th, also March 3rd on Chinese Lunar Calendar, the 15th Oriental Girls’ Festival opened at Shanghai Baolong Arts Center. It was sponsored by SHNU College of Women Culture, China Outstanding Traditions and Cultural Heritage (Gu’s Embroidery) Base, SHNU College of Film，SHNU Film-Television and Communication College, Shanghai Intangible Cultural Heritage of Songjiang District and Shanghai Sanxin Middle School.
The show included over 70 art works and some Gu’s embroidery inheritors and skilled apprentices performed the process of this traditional skill on the scene.
After the ceremony, a seminar on Education and Practice of Gu’s Embroidery was also held among SHNU arts management majors.
An introduction on Gu’s embroidery was followed: Gu’s embroidery, a “painting embroidery”, was created by women folks of Gu’s family in later Ming Dynasty in Shanghai. It has a history of more than four hundred years in China.
With versed literacy and exquisite embroidery art in that time, the artists used the needles as the soft brush and the silk as pigments, applied their adept embroidery art to copy and redefine the artistic realm of the famous painting.
It developed the needlework just for general use in ancient times to the painting embroidery for pure appreciation and was well known for the extolled praise from the literati painting circle headed by Qichang Dong.
Gu’s embroidery is the only embroidery branch by a clan’s name, and starts the convention that an embroidery branch would be named by its region. It achieved the head position among the several embroidery branches.It was the symbol of Chinese feminism culture.
