Photographs in Thread

By: Reed Black

April 2007

The morning sun flashes through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, but master

“Jungle River,” 2002, silk and cotton thread on gabardine.

embroiderer Bui Thi Nam has been awake for hours, examining an exquisite jungle image by celebrated nature photographer Frans Lanting. She is an artist trained in the highly refined skill of breathing life into cloth. Today she is making mist.

Continuing the centuries-old tradition of Vietnamese embroiderers who drew inspiration from paintings by renowned artists, the La Than Imperial Embroidery team interprets images by contemporary nature photographers. Its founders, Lawrence A. Gooberman and Jennifer Ha Than, aspire to three goals: to preserve this 350-year-old Vietnamese art form, to foster international cooperation through collaborative artistic creation and to expose a broad audience to nature’s greatest wonders through embroidery.

Than was born in Vietnam, where she worked in the family embroidery business. After the Vietnam War she emigrated to the United States to study fashion design and embark on a career in fashion and textile design. Gooberman is an environmentalist whose firm, Laurel Associates Inc., acquires environmentally sensitive lands for conservation organizations. “The textures of these embroideries bring us closer to the natural places they depict,” he says. “The mysterious stillness of forest shadows, the sudden bursts of light give the viewer the feeling of being in the wilderness.” The founders share an enthusiasm for Asian art that brought them together at art shows and events, often at the Asia Society in New York. The guiding concept that evolved is rooted in the founders’ conservationist and artistic backgrounds. Their concept was to create large-scale, one-of-a-kind embroideries of unsurpassed quality, building upon several historical precedents.

Gooberman admires Ansel Adams and his philosophy of “art in service of nature.” Inspired by the needlework renditions of works by 20th-century masters, including Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Klee, Calder, Kandinsky and Ernst, Gooberman and Than studied other collaborative embroidery that was being created in remote parts of the world. For example, the Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti commissioned many of his paintings to be embroidered in Afghanistan, and the American photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum had a collection of his photography reproduced at the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute in China.
Frans Lanting, “Jungle River, Borneo,” 1991, LightJet print.
Based on this knowledge of collaborative work, the La Than Imperial Embroidery project moved forward with the assurance that great contemporary nature photography could find new meaning and a broad audience in the idiom of Vietnamese hand-sewn embroideries. Working together with La Than, three world-renowned nature photographers, Lanting, Christopher Burkett and Robert Turner each selected one image that could best be transformed into embroidery. The first photograph selected, Lanting’s “Jungle River, Borneo” 1991, explores the mysterious world along a twisting river in Borneo, where the filtered sunlight and mist nourish the lush flora. In Burkett’s selection, “Glowing Autumn Forest,” 2000, light tunnels through a Virginia forest like a kaleidoscope, revealing the drama of summer’s end. Turner’s “Alpenglow on Hurricane Ridge,” 1998, captures the celestial mountain light first identified by pioneering naturalist John Muir.

The embroideries, which can take up to a year to produce and are slated for prospective museum exhibitions that are currently in discussion (the Museum of Arts & Design in New York is considering an exhibition), are mounted in handcrafted hardwood frames. The original photographs will hang in matching frames alongside the embroideries. The embroidery team consists of eight highly trained artists: Six specialize in needlework, one selects thread colors and one draws and colors the template for the embroidery. Every detail is coordinated under the watchful eye of studio director Nguyen Thu Ha. The images are transformed from photograph to embroidery through the artists’ understanding of what the Vietnamese call the “soul” of a space: the overall light, texture and spatial ambience of each photograph. All fine embroidery is a sort of alchemy, transforming sewn silk and cotton into the material it depicts. But these three works perform a special magic: the transformation of thread into the foliage and geography of some of Earth’s most treasured places by revealing the unifying mood among the details.
“Glowing Autumn Forest” (detail), 2004, silk and cotton thread on gabardine.
“This fine Vietnamese embroidery captures and communicates texture, depth and richness in a way no other art form can,” says Nguyen Van Huy, director of the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi and curator of “Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit,” which was at New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 2003. “By partnering with photographers, La Than has developed a unique approach to a historic art form. This innovative blend of past and present represents the state of the art.”

La Than Imperial Embroidery
171 East 89th St., Studio 1-C
New York, NY 10128
www.lathanembroidery.com

Reed Black is a scholar and journalist who writes about the arts and culture of developing nations in Asia and South America.