It is not rare to stumble upon artists who create embroidered motifs on vintage portraits. Yet Han Cao's embroidered photographs have got a special surreal quality about them.
A self-taught artist living in Palm Springs, Han Cao uses long-forgotten vintage images found at flea markets and antique shops and decorates them with delicate embroideries, using fibers to symbolise the thread that binds us all and adding in this way a new tactile dimension to the image.
At times the motifs created on the images are abstract or they highlight a section of the landscape (a technique mainly used by the artist on faded postcards collected from second-hand shops).
But in other cases Han Cao attempts to create new narratives: in her "Combustion" series, for example, the heads of some of the people formally posing for the camera, explode in hundreds of multi-coloured French knots. Maybe this is a metaphor to hint at the state of mind of the person portrayed, or maybe it is just a very original way to erase somebody from a picture, obliterating them with colours rather than cutting them out.
In other cases the heads of some of the people portrayed are replaced with embroidered heads of animals - from birds and cats to horses - an effect that looks cute, fun and, at times, also a bit disturbing.
Yet there are also embroidered motifs employed as a sort of social commentary: her "Flower wife" series portrays a groom sitting next to a wife transformed into a beautiful embroidered flower.
The artist conceives this flower as a way to celebrate the life and beauty of women, who often appear secondary in photographs from the early 1900s. Han Cao pays homage in this way through her colourful embroidered motifs to all those women who may have been forgotten by history.
The latest series by Han Cao - entitled the "Quarantine Collection" - was directly inspired by our complex times and the Coronavirus pandemic.
The artist spent lockdown hand-embroidering floral face masks on vintage photographs of anonymous characters. The face masks are covered in tiny floral motifs or they come in the shape of a variety of flowers - dandelions, poppies and daisies, peonies, forget-me-nots and violets.
In this way while Han Cao contributes to remember this significant, historic time and the efforts to protect and save lives, she also tries to spread some much-needed optimism, turning the face mask into a colourful flower (the masks can also be lifted to discover the expression of the person portrayed).
On the artist's site there is a shop section where it is possible to buy a variety of works or even commission your own embroidered portrait or photograph. Commissions may take 6-8 weeks to complete, but the final result is worth the wait.
In fact you wonder how long it will be before Han Cao will be chosen for the next fashion and art collaboration: some of her pictures like the one entitled "In Bloom" showing a man in a tailored jacket partially covered in multi-coloured flowers wouldn't indeed look out of place as a print on a T-shirt in a collection à la Dries Van Noten.
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