Lietti, M 2021, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, enhanced Focus, EdiXion, Dubai.
Grandmother’s memory as the poetic engine of artistic research. In moments of economic difficulty, her grandmother would dedicate herself to unravelling old jumpers to reuse the yarn and create new garments for the whole family. That circular gesture, repeated by millions of women in the past and still today, transforms for Miranda into the conceptual nucleus of every work: weaving as safeguarding of memory, interweaving as metaphor for human connections that traverse time.
Female time becomes an instrument of cultural resistance. Miranda recovers loom and knitting needles not only as artistic techniques, but as a vindication of a different temporality, the slow and meditative one of domestic work. In an era of digital acceleration, every stitch, every interweaving restores dignity to gestures that official history has always considered marginal. It is the empty time to navigate with imagination that allows the artist to transform repetition into creation, as Manuela Lietti from the Art Consulting network writes in the book.
Wool and cotton, codes of affective and social narration. In the current artistic panorama, where technological innovation is often privileged, Miranda chooses materials that carry within themselves family and collective stories. They are not only technical instruments, but the very voice of memory: every fibre tells of hands that have worked it, of bodies that have worn it, of gestures of love handed down from mother to daughter. It is this emotional intensity that transforms simple threads into universal language.
Enhanced content of the book. Explore the multimedia materials embedded:
– p. 6: The artist tells her story
– p. 9: How her artworks are born
