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Qiaojie
An
Ho, 1993, watercolor on silk mounted on rice paper using traditional
Chinese technique, 54" x 88"
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| Daughter
of Wang Xifeng, Qiaojie was initially called Dajieer (Daughter
Number One). She was sickly as a child. During the peasant woman
Liu Laolao's visit to the Prospect Garden, Xifeng asks her to
bless her daughter with a name. When Liu Laolao learns that Dajieer
was born on the seventh day of the seventh month in the lunar
calendar, she suggests that Dajieer be named Qiaojie (The Serendipity
Maiden). Liu Laolao is making clever use of the associations Dajieer's
birthday has with the legend of the Herd Boy and the Weaver Maid
who are destined to meet once a year on that day. Qiao meaning
"coincidence," the name Qiaojie is thus doubly felicitous: it
signifies a birth that coincides with the annual reunion of the
two celestial lovers and resonates esthetically with the stock-in-trade
formula "wu qiao bu cheng hua" (without coincidence there would
be no story) that traditional story tellers used to ground their
imaginative creations. In the sequel, Liu Laolao rescues Qiaojie
from her rapacious relatives and marries her to the son of a rich
landlord. |
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