Sophie Declerck
MA work
MA work
The ‘Small Skills’ of Sewing Tiger Caps: The Reinvented Folk Tradition of the Chinese Children’s Cap in Northern China 1978–2015
The Chinese children’s tiger cap (虎头帽 hutoumao) has grown from a domestic needlework craft of the rural folk in the early twentieth century to a modern exhibitive art form, a souvenir, commodity, heritage artefact and contemporary national mascot. Throughout the Qing dynasty and the Republican period, Han mothers and grandmothers in northern China fabricated handmade caps, shoes and bibs in the shape of a tiger to safeguard their newborn children. This custom symbolised fundamental concerns in the lives of China’s rural parents: the consolidation of social relationships and kinship, the mobilisation of magic-religious power and ‘technologies of anticipation’ in the face of illness and death, the connection with an ancestral past and future posterity, and the continuity of intrinsic philosophical values and symbolic codes. Based on short-term fieldwork in Beijing, in Shandong and Shaanxi provinces, this dissertation aims to bring out a critical and nuanced analysis of the Chinese folk tiger cap in the post-Maoist era. This dissertation is a debate on the production of tradition and identity in modern Chinese society: the design of the tiger cap serves to introduce a discursive space in which state policies, ritual customs, heritage protection, nationalism, collective memory, rural craft practice, gender, commercialisation, tourism and cultural identity are actively manufactured and imagined. The folk tiger image is now resourced, processed, reinvented and consumed to satisfy different purposes and demands, be it heritage preservation, tourism promotion, nostalgic desire or children’s fashion design. The contemporary tiger cap constitutes a dynamic, reconstructed marker of national identity, founded upon Hobsbawn’s instrumental concept of ‘invented tradition’, and Wu Ka- ming’s notion of ‘hyper-folk’ as a cultural mechanism for representing a new rural reality in a state-governed neoliberal market economy.
Info
Info
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MA Degree
School
School of Humanities
Programme
MA History of Design, 2016
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Contact
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+44 (0)7591 104985
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I am a London-based design researcher with a background in fine art photography and linguistics. My fields of focus include Asian textiles and fashion, contemporary design and popular culture in China, folk art, and Tibetan material culture. I am also interested in sustainability, craft practice and emotional experience design. I currently work as a design community researcher for In The Window, an online story-telling and curating platform for interior designers, makers and architects.
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Degrees
- BA Applied Linguistics - English/Mandarin, University of Antwerp, Belgium, 2012; BA Visual Arts - Photography, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium, 2013
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Experience
- Archive intern, White Cube, London, 2013; Editorial researcher, Research Research Ltd, London, 2014–2016; Museum volunteer, V&A Museum, London, 2015; Design community intern, In The Window, London, 2016
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Awards
- Object Essay Prize, Gillian Naylor Essay Prize in memory of Tom Naylor, 2015; Travel Award, Anthony Gardner Fund, 2015