Our Story

 

My cousin Xiao Ran

 

From Lotus Fields to Water Lilies

Our story began far from museums.

My cousin grew up in Anxiang, a rural town in China where lotus is the main agricultural crop. Like hundreds of families in her community, hers worked in lotus farming.

To tourists and outsiders, lotus fields are filled with vivid colors, summer breezes, and playful water scenes. To her, they meant persistent mud under her nails, cuts from sharp thorns, and wrinkled skin after hours of standing in water.

From a young age, she wanted more choice. Like many girls raised close to the land, she dreamed of a life not dictated by weather, harvests, or inherited roles. She began experimenting with materials, teaching herself craft and design, using making as a way to imagine independence.

Yet the lotus fields had trained her eye long before she knew the language of art—how light shifts across water, how color repeats and breaks, how patience becomes instinct. When she first encountered Monet’s Water Lilies in a book, the paintings felt immediately familiar. Lotus and water lilies are often mistaken for one another, and to her, the images echoed the fields she grew up in—recognizable, yet transformed.

She wanted to translate these paintings into something practical and tangible—something her down-to-earth family could relate to and understand. Through hand-felting wool, she began shaping berets that carry the movement, palette, and quiet rhythm of impressionist paintings. Each piece is made slowly, entirely by hand, allowing texture and color to emerge through repetition rather than precision.

Over time, her work expanded beyond Monet to include other impressionist and modern compositions, always interpreted, never copied. What began as an attempt to escape gradually became a reconciliation.

Today, her studio remains rooted in the village she once hoped to escape. As a woman-led business, it creates flexible, skill-based work for local women—many from similar agricultural backgrounds—allowing them to earn independently while staying close to their families and community. In a place where opportunities are limited, craft becomes both livelihood and agency.

Her work is no longer about leaving the fields behind.
It is about transforming what the fields gave her—into art, dignity, and possibility.