Cleveland Museum of Art

Sericulture (The Process of Making Silk)

Liang Kai

Date

early 1200s

Medium

Handscroll; ink and color on silk

Culture

China, Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279)

Department

Chinese Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

By the Southern Song period, the economic center of the silk industry had shifted to the lower Yangzi delta, while the north continued to be troubled by wars. Divided into three sections, the handscroll illustrates 14 steps in the process of making silk, from the raising of silkworms to the weaving of silk cloth. The scroll’s scenes follow the illustrations of Lou Shou’s (1090–1162) Pictures of Tilling and Weaving (gengzhi tu), the first recorded painting of this genre, which was conceived in Hangzhou around 1145. However, in the Cleveland painting the artist groups several scenes of sericulture together under the roof of an open structure. The painting is attributed to Liang Kai, a court artist active from about 1201 to 1204 at the Imperial Painting Academy in the city of Hangzhou, a major silk weaving center from that time to the present day.

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