Giving cotton a new frame of reference

Innovative design

In 2015, Xu drew inspiration from the double-sided embroidery and applied it to paintings made of cotton wadding.

"Traditional painting methods usually require a canvas stretching at the back, forming a semi-relief form, while I used gauze in the middle as the background for actually two paintings on the front and back," she explains.

Her innovation immediately earned her the best design award in the small object category at the 2016 international quilting contest hosted by the China Fashion and Color Association.

She has also upgraded the painting technique that enables the art to jump out of a frame.

For example, to make flower works, she twisted cotton into a thread as a skeleton (branch), and then cotton-fashioned petals were added to it. "This way, the entire flower is made of cotton," she says.