Liang Shaoji, who since the late 1980s dedicated himself to making art with silkworms, has died.
The artist, who lived in a temple on Mount Tiantai in central Zhejiang Province in China, incorporated silk spinning with installation, performance, video and sound art. In his Snow Cover series (2014), silkworms were given everyday objects in which to live, slowly taking wine bottles, coffee boxes, plastic cups, poster papers, high-heeled shoes and electronic components with their silk, or weaving amidst broken porcelain or withered twigs.
‘For me, silk resembles a visible reflection of the knotting point of time and life – the imprint of being and beings,’ Liang once explained.
Liang’s largescale Destiny installation (2012–14) envisaged a post apocalyptic scene of iron plate, iron powder, oil barrels, polyurethane colophony wrapped in silk and cocoons. Writing in ArtReview, Zoe Zhang Bing notes that through such work the artist ‘manages both to describe a relationship between mankind and nature, and to reflect a cultural and historical understanding of ‘life’ through a personal perspective.’
Born in Shanghai, Liang studied soft sculpture with one of the world’s leading tapestry artists, the Bulgarian Maryn Varbanov, at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (then called the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts), graduating from its School of Tapestry in 1989.
