Concept & Practice
How do patterns carry knowledge and memory, and how do time and communities participate in creation?
Cross, Wan and Key-Fret form the philosophical starting point of this practice, bringing together reflections on origins, structure, rules, time and cycles. Pattern Civilization is the expression of this worldview through patterns.
Pattern Civilization grew from years of fieldwork, collecting and research into Miao embroidery. It considers the knowledge and creativity that patterns carry beyond any one lifetime.
Communities choose symbols, agree on structures, transmit them and shape them over time. This sequence guides her understanding of traditional patterns and her inquiry into time and communities as participants in creation.
Read the full reflection ↘︎Patterns on traditional clothing are often connected to identity, placement on the body and ways of life. Through looking, learning and use, people pass on shared knowledge and memory.
Across textiles from different periods, some basic forms recur while details change with each act of making. This long process of repetition, learning and small adjustments is understood here as time participating in creation.
A garment is stitched by particular people, while shared symbols, structures and uses are learned and passed on within a community. Individual skill and shared conventions together sustain the patterns.
Artist’s reflection
In the summer of 2017, I drew the many mother-form symbols I had identified on sheets of paper, looking at how often they recurred and how they related. The cross, wan and key-fret emerged from this field of symbols. Their simple shapes opened a way for me to think about the world through patterns.
In my reading, the horizontal line is yin and the earth; the vertical is yang and the sky. They meet at the centre and open towards the four directions. Two lines retain their own directions while becoming a whole at their crossing. I see in this form a fundamental relationship: opposing forces depend on each other and bring life into being.
I imagine the cross entering boundless time, turning around its centre. As its four arms bend, the wan appears. The centre remains, while the four directions acquire movement. A still structure gains the power to change continuously. Motion and order can exist within the same form.
The key-fret repeatedly turns back and continues; the spiral unfolds around a centre, passing through similar directions but reaching new positions. Seasons return and generations succeed one another. Each return carries time with it, and is already different from what came before. For me, this is the meaning of hui: cycles that rise, and life that continues to grow.
The cross gives the world structure. The wan sets that structure in motion. The key-fret carries motion onwards, growing through cycles.
I also arranged the mother-forms I had identified in a diagram moving from the universe and space towards life, divinity, human society and the individual. At its innermost point I placed the ancestors. My gaze moved inwards towards them, while life unfolded outwards, generation after generation. People inherit ancestral life and live lives of their own; older mother-forms enter new acts of making and give rise to different patterns.
Working with Cross, Wan and Key-Fret as mother-forms, Zeng Li develops contemporary patterns through her exploration of structure, movement and continuity.
Traditional Miao embroidery · Reading symbols
The cross, wan and hui recur in traditional patterns, sometimes taking distinct forms, sometimes interwoven. Colour and ornament draw the eye, while the symbols within often pass unnoticed.
In her view, these simple forms hold an understanding of the workings of the universe and the cycles of life. Civilization lives within the clothing of mountain communities, continuing across generations through everyday life. Her thinking on Pattern Civilization grows from this.