Taiwan Today

Chang Hsien-ping has dedicated nearly four decades to the craft of bamboo weaving.

Bamboo, which grows primarily in regions with warmer climates, has been used for millennia in daily life in cultures across Asia. In Taiwan, many older people still remember days spent angling with homemade bamboo fishing rods or singing lullabies to babies in bamboo cradles. Although such everyday items made of bamboo have long since been replaced by products made of synthetic materials, Chang Hsien-ping (張憲平) has managed to preserve part of bamboo culture by reinterpreting the craft of weaving it from an artistic angle.

Chang was just 47 years old when he became the youngest winner of Taiwan’s Folk Art Heritage Award in 1990. He is also one of the very few contemporary artists in the country to have works collected by the National Palace Museum, which is known worldwide for the quality and quantity of its holdings of traditional Chinese art and antiquities. The startling thing about Chang’s success is that he had little experience with bamboo until he reached his early 30s. Still, being born and raised in a family that had run a business turning out woven straw products since the early 1900s did give him plenty of weaving experience. His grandfather, who wove straw hats and mats by hand, was one of the top craftsmen in Yuanli Township, Miaoli County, northern Taiwan, which was the hub of the local straw products trade. Chang’s father inherited the straw weaving business, but he eventually realized that making products by hand did not generate the income needed to raise a growing number of children. A few years after Chang was born, his father moved the operation to the neighboring town of Zhunan and started to “mechanize” production by using looms.

The major buyers of woven straw products were Japanese and business was good in the 1950s and 1960s. At its peak, the company needed to hire around 100 craftsmen to fill orders, and all 11 children in Chang’s family had to help in the factory after school and on weekends and holidays. Chang recalls that the children had to finish their assigned share of the work before they could go play. Naturally, all of them tried to get things done as fast as possible—even cut some corners if necessary—so that they could have more time to play. “But father would personally check each and every piece and make us redo the ones that didn’t meet his standards,” Chang says. “He made us realize that it’s the dedication to a trade and being a stickler for details that matters.”

As the eldest son of the family, Chang was also made to understand that he had a stronger responsibility to the family business than his siblings. Although Chang had learned to weave straw as a child, his father began taking him aside and giving him extra guidance in weaving techniques when Chang was in junior high school. His father died of cancer in 1969 and Chang, then 26, took over as head of the family business, which continued turning out woven straw sheets for companies in Japan, where they were used to make finished products.

A few years later, a business associate in Japan asked Chang to help him find a Taiwanese manufacturer of high-quality bamboo lampshades. A thorough search, however, revealed that no local company was capable of meeting the buyer’s quality standards. “I figured that I might give it a try since I’d been weaving straw for a long time,” Chang says. “All I needed to do was to replace straw with bamboo, and how hard could that be?”

Makino bamboo, or Phyl-lostachys makinoi, features long spaces between its joints, or nodes. The species is also known for having tough and pliant fibers, which means that its culms, or stems, can be split into fine strips, making it the preferred species for craftsmen. Even better, Chang found that there was no problem in securing a supply of raw material, as makino is the most widely grown bamboo species in Taiwan.

The material, however, turned out to be much more difficult to work with than Chang had imagined. He explains that as the bamboo strips used for weaving need to be uniform in width and thickness, the stripping technique plays a large role in determining the quality of final products. It is difficult to bend an individual bamboo lath to form a perfect circle, for example, if the thickness along the length of the entire strip is uneven. And unless all the bamboo laths have the exact same thickness and width, it is impossible to achieve a product with a symmetrical shape. Sophisticated craftsmen can strip bamboo uniformly by hand, but Chang realized that the process needed to be mechanized if the company wanted to begin commercial production of woven bamboo goods. The problem with mechanization, however, is that bamboo’s joints and varying thickness and circumference make calibrating production equipment difficult. Since the stripping machinery available on the market did not suit his needs, Chang had to have his made to order.

Weaving the material was also a challenge. “Contrary to what I’d thought, most of my straw weaving techniques didn’t work with bamboo,” Chang says. “Basically, you need two different techniques to weave the two materials.” Picking up the know-how for weaving bamboo, however, was not a smooth process. Chang explains that bamboo weaving was already a sunset industry in Taiwan in the 1970s, as plastic had replaced natural materials in the manufacturing of most everyday products. There were some older craftsmen who still knew the necessary techniques, but as they were unwilling to share for one reason or another, Chang was left to experiment on his own.

Nevertheless, Weng Hsiu-te (翁徐得), an expert on folk arts and former director of the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute (NTCRI) in Nantou County, central Taiwan, thinks that Chang might have benefited from his process of self-education. “Figuring things out all by himself was a good thing because he could develop his own style without being restrained by old techniques,” Weng says.

After nearly three years of trial and error, Chang delivered his first sample lampshade to his Japanese client. The client was very happy with the sample’s quality and contracted Chang to begin mass producing the lampshades, an effort that would ultimately continue for almost two decades. In the 1980s when business was at its peak, Chang’s company exported 3,000 bamboo lampshades a month to Japan, where they were assembled with other components into finished products. Chiang Shao-ying (江韶瑩) is director of the Museum of World Religions in New Taipei City and an expert on folk arts. Chiang notes that while Chang’s profit from manufacturing lampshades was probably slim, the weaver had managed to keep an old craft alive by finding a workable new application for it.

Love Affair with Weaving

Manufacturing lampshades familiarized Chang with bamboo, but his love affair with weaving the material really began in his mid-30s, when another Japanese businessman gave him a bamboo basket commonly used for flower arrangements in Japan and asked him to reproduce it. Chang was fascinated by the deceptively simple appearance of the intricately twined basket and took on the challenge.

Three-year-old makino bamboo, which Chang had been using for lampshades, also turned out to be a good material for weaving baskets. Processing the raw material is similar, except that the original green surface is preserved for bamboo used in lampshades, while it is removed when used for twined basketry. Twining involves more complex interlacing of individual strands than weaving. After the surface is removed, the next step is hand stripping. Chang explains that bamboo split by machines can be used only for cruder weaving, while for graceful twined baskets, bamboo must be hand-stripped into very narrow and thin laths. The narrowest laths Chang uses are just 0.6 millimeters wide and 0.3 millimeters thick. Only extremely skilled and experienced craftsmen are able to strip bamboo laths to those dimensions.

Merely using thin strips, however, does not guarantee that a basket will have a delicate shape. The key lies in splitting the bamboo carefully and evenly to produce laths that have almost the same width and thickness. Each lath is then painstakingly polished to remove any rough edges and the ends are shaved to the desired angle.

It took Chang three months to deliver his first twined bamboo basket, for which he was paid US$740—a significant amount of money in the late 1970s. Once again, the Japanese client was happy with the result and orders for dozens of copies of specific designs began to pour in. The baskets Chang and his team of trained craftsmen created brought in up to US$2,000 each.

There was obviously some serious money in such production but Chang, after spending four years working on reproductions and developing sophisticated techniques, was thinking about moving in a different direction. “I was convinced that bamboo weaving was a special creative outlet for me,” he says. “I felt like I had to spend more time to discover what I could actually do with it.” He asked his wife to manage the business, handed production over to his craftsmen and started devoting most of his time to creating his own pieces.

Since he began focusing on creative weaving in the early 1980s, Chang has only turned out between 50 and 60 original works. They come in all shapes and sizes, with each taking between three and six months to complete. In addition to the techniques he picked up from making Japanese baskets, Chang has spent a lot of time studying the art of bamboo and rattan weaving in Egypt, Indonesia, mainland China, the Philippines and Thailand, as well as that of Taiwan’s indigenous tribes. He integrates discoveries from his studies into his own works. Folk art expert Chiang Shao-ying says that in many folk arts or traditional crafts, the emphasis is usually put on preserving the original techniques rather than being creative, but Chang stands out by never being afraid to try something new.

Chang’s sense of design also continues to evolve. The weaver relied on mostly geometric patterns in his earlier works, then turned to the use of “organic” patterns with the shapes of plants and animals and shifted once again by employing concepts that “play with light and shadow,” as he puts it. In recent years, Chang has cut down on fine weaving and started using bamboo in installation art.

Making It Last

Creativity is not only found in crafting fine bamboo works, but also in making them last. Chang explains that bamboo’s weakness lies in the difficulty of preserving it, as most bamboo species have very low resistance to biological degradation and some species can deteriorate in just two years. “You want to see what you’ve spent so much time and energy to create last longer,” he says.

Chang spent several years consulting with experts and trying out different ways of preserving bamboo. He learned that to increase bamboo’s durability, it needs to be coated or bleached. In the end, by modifying the conventional methods of varnishing wooden furniture, he came up with a unique coating that enabled him to produce durable bamboo pieces with a seasoned look. In fact, the special coating was so successful that it once sparked controversy at an art exhibition, where some viewers expressed suspicion that Chang’s pieces were actually antiques rather than original works.

Bamboo weaving has won Chang nearly every craft award in Taiwan and much praise, but he says there has been more pain than joy over the years. His eyesight and back have suffered from long hours of work and his mind has been taxed by figuring out ways to make breakthroughs and improve his craftsmanship. He has also worried about the future of the craft. Initially, Chang thought of trying to preserve bamboo weaving by “modernizing” its production process with the use of machinery, but his efforts found little success. He turned to another preservation technique in the 1980s, when he began to teach bamboo weaving and its applications at the NTCRI, community organizations and university design departments. He discovered that the best way to get his students’ attention is to show them some of his works, then reveal their market value. “This is a tedious and time-consuming craft that requires total devotion,” Chang says. “You can’t just ask people to do that unless you can show them that they can feed themselves with it and that there’s a future in it.”

Chang still teaches at NTCRI and in communities. Admittedly, most of his students see bamboo weaving as a hobby. But once in a while, a student develops a passion for the craft similar to Chang’s and makes a career out of it. One such student is Pan San-mei (潘三妹), who learned the technique for weaving bamboo from Chang in the mid-1980s at a class at the administrative office of Nanzhuang Township in Miaoli County. She then worked for several years at Chang’s factory, where she became a skilled bamboo weaver. Pan went on to launch her own career and makes bamboo pots and jars inspired by the culture of Taiwan’s Saisiyat indigenous people. In 2002, Pan’s piece Saisiyat Image took second prize at the National Crafts Awards. Obviously, the fact that Pan won the award has not done much to ease Chang’s back pain, but it definitely has eased some of his worries about the future of the craft.

Write to Jim Hwang at cyhuang03@mofa.gov.tw