Tea Talk

(another PPBNKLS event,

April 2010)

PERSATUAN PERANAKAN BABA NYONYA KUALA LUMPUR

PERANAKAN BABA NYONYA ASSOCIATION KUALA LUMPUR

By Dr. Hwei-Fen Cheah

Date:  10 April 2010 (Saturday)

Time:  4 to 6 pm

Venue: VIP Room, Tenji Japanese Buffet Restaurant

Lot L-01-01 SohoKL,  2 Jalan Solaris, Solaris Mont Kiara , 50480 Kuala Lumpur .

Cost: RM 20.00 net per person

Refreshments: Coffee/Tea, cakes, cookies and snacks will be served. 

 

What the talk is about:

Dr. Hwei Fen Cheah will share with us beautiful visuals and examples of Nyonya beadwork and embroidery. She will draw comparisons with dress, costumes, jewellery and interior decorations to explore Peranakan Chinese ideas about fashion, identity, change and women’s lives in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. Dr Hwei Fen is herself a Nyonya currently residing in Australia.

Biodata : Hwei-Fen lectures in Asian art and textile history at the Australian National University.  Her book on Nyonya beadwork in the Straits Settlements, based on her doctoral study, has just been published in March 2010 by National University of Singapore Press.

Other attractions:

- An Artisan from Malacca specialising in Kasut manik (Beaded shoes) will demonstrate the unique art of nyonya beadwork and bring kasut manik for sale.

- Display of rare beautiful beaded items on loan to PPBNKLS.

-Sale of Hwei Fen’s book, ‘Phoenix Rising: Narratives of Nyonya Beadwork from the Straits Settlements’

 

 

 Phoenix Rising: Narratives in Nonya Beadwork from the Straits Settlements

Cheah Hwei-Fe’n

publication year: March 2010
400 pages
ISBN: 978-9971-69-468-5  Paperback  US$58.00   RM140.00 ISBN: 978-9971-69-516-3  Hardback  US$78.00 RM185.00 

Until the first half of the twentieth century, Nonya beadwork and embroidery were important means of textile decoration for the Peranakans, the acculturated Chinese settlers in the Straits Settlements and the Netherlands Indies. Intricate and visually distinctive, Nonya beadwork is now regarded as a visual marker of a quaint Peranakan past. Its amalgamation of local, Chinese, and European influences is seen as a testimony to the celebrated hybridity of the Peranakan heritage. This book contributes to the scholarship of Southeast Asian textile history by focusing on the relatively neglected area of needlework, demonstrating its potential as a source of cultural and historical information. The book also expands the perspectives on Peranakan Chinese decorative art by focusing on the historicity of Nonya beadwork, both as object and activity, whereby beadwork becomes a tool to probe the social and symbolic world of the Peranakans.

By unravelling the history of Nonya beadwork through an analysis of the changes in the Peranakans’ attitudes towards beading and the modifications of techniques, designs, and styles in beadwork, this thesis reveals the shifting expressions of Peranakan culture and identity in the Straits Settlements as the Peranakan community engaged with modernity, gendered norms, and an ancestral heritage in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, expressions from which Peranakan culture is conceived of in the present.

The text is illustrated with 150 photographs of Nonya beadwork from museums and private collectors in Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States.

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It seems that interest in matters Peranakan is on the rise as Cedric Tan, Hon Secretary, PPBNKLS sent an email today stating:

“We received overwhelming response to the talk on Nyonya beading and therefore have to close the reservation with immediate effect.”

 

Hence this posting is to place on record yet another event organized by PPBNKLS, currently an extremely active association catering to the Peranakans in Malaysia who have traditionally been found in the former colonial Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore.