Phoenix Rising: Narratives in Nyonya Beadwork from the Straits Settlements

Intricate, meticulously crafted and visually distinctive. Nyonya beadwork occupies a significant role in the cultural imaginary of the Peranakan Chinese, the acculturated descendants of Chinese migrants to the Malay peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago. Drawing on private and public collections in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Europe, and the United States, this book offers a rigorous art-historical study of Nyonya beadwork. The author analyzes its social roles and the appropriations and changes in its forms, styles, and imagery to reveal the shifting expressions of Peranakan Chinese culture and identity as the community engaged with modernity, gendered norms, and ancestral heritage in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, expressions from which Peranakan Chinese culture is conceived in the present. Inscribed into the history of Nyonya beadwork is a narrative of the Peranakan Chinese community’s cultural transformation.This book contributes to the ongoing dialogue on Peranakan Chinese artifacts and culture and extends the research on Southeast Asian textile history through its focus on the still embryonic field of Southeast Asian needlework.