Material world

IN THE LAST 30 years, renowned Chinese artist Liang Shaoji has been spending most of his time on a mountain with mulberry silkworms, learning as much as he can about their lives and habits. To create art, he gently places them on various surfaces and objects, then coaxes them to spin threads around the objects.

The 73-year-old man uses sound, light, smell and temperature to guide them towards certain directions to create specific patterns. And the results, as seen in a new exhibition at NTU Centre of Contemporary Art, are quite ethereal.

One of them is a large shimmering tapestry of silk titled Broken Landscape. Caught within its tangle of threads are the silkworms' cocoons, their excrement and the eggs they lay after they become moths. Because the tapestry is large - over 5 metres long and 1.4 metres wide - it manages to evoke not just the miracle of natural silk production, but also the life cycles of silkworms as they live or die on the surface of the material.