Rescuing nomadic art from the edge

Learning from the master

But Meng soon realized passion alone wasn't enough; she needed training. She had learned from elderly craftspeople scattered across Xinjiang's pastoral regions, but her knowledge remained fragmented.

Then, in 2014, at an exhibition in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, she met Li Siqin, a national-level master craftsman from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. Impressed by Meng's large-scale works inspired by Xinjiang's culture, Li took her on as an apprentice.

He offered two pieces of advice that would shape her career.

First, he urged her to document the work of aging craftspeople through videos and written accounts and master their techniques faithfully. Second, he encouraged her to develop her own creative system from everything she had learned.

Li also reminded her that Xinjiang leather carving drew on more than 3,000 years of history.

"That gave me the final push, and I decided to commit fully to this path," Meng says.

Over the following years, several of the elderly masters she learned from passed away, reinforcing the urgency of preserving their knowledge.

For the past decade, she has traveled from one pastoral community to another — Ili Kazak autonomous prefecture, Tacheng prefecture, Altay, and now Kashgar — setting up workshops and training local residents.