By Kahyun Lee
In The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker traces how embroidery, which was long used to train women in patience and confinement, also became a language women held in common, a medium of connection and self-assertion passed down the generations. In Parker’s account, the needle is double-edged. The same history divided needle from brush, placing it in hierarchy that ranked craft beneath art and the feminine beneath the masculine. Qintong Yu’s practice reflects on these inherited hierarchies. In Yu’s work, the woven becomes the structure women build around one another, even as a woman’s interior life remains in constant friction with the world outside, and the drawn line carries the memory of thread.
Yu is a visual artist working through illustration, with a practice centred on female subjectivity. Through intricate compositions, figures and symbolic motifs are bound together to the point where personal narrative meets collective history. In A Matriarchal Weave (2026), three women stand within a sanctuary of ferns and broad-leaved foliage, framed by a pair of pale classical columns. The white-haired eldest extends a hand to the shoulder of the young woman at the centre; the second leans in from the other side, completing a chain of touch that runs through the composition like a current. The faces are rendered in muted greys and greens, while the chromatic intensity of the work gathers in the garments. An embroidered panel of roses on the young woman’s chest is set against geometric borders in orange and jade at the collar, cuff and waistband. The three garments do not match, yet they speak the same pattern language. Solidarity here is stitched rather than spoken. Each woman wears her portion of a shared inheritance, and the touch that joins them travels along the same lines as the embroidery.
A shelter built by others can only be tested once a woman stands outside it. Veil of Becoming (2025) withdraws the foremothers and leaves a woman alone. She presses a hand against a face rendered in acid green, dark-lacquered nails resting on her cheek, while her black hair loosens into ribbons of smoke-grey that drift across her bare neck and shoulders and refuse to settle. The only fabric in the image is the one her body produces. Hair becomes veil, veil becomes weather, and the woman weaves herself a covering out of her own substance. Each strand is drawn in a single unbroken stroke, a thread the image declines to knot. The hand both shields the face and presents it, and in this doubled gesture, Yu locates the labour of self-definition undertaken without the safety net the earlier work depicts.
Yu’s works argue that the garment between women is what makes becoming bearable. Where the matriarchs clothe one another in pattern, the solitary figure must become her own loom. In Yu’s hands, the brushstroke and the stitch, so long divided by the hierarchy Parker described, are returned to one another. The viewer, tracing the thread from one work to the other, learns what the fabric was for.
