HANMIN ZHANG（the left）, the owner of Lanxu Zha-ran Textile company in China

When I had the chance talk to Hanmin, I felt like she is such a good example of how young generation can inherit our cultural heritage

She was born in Dali where is the hometown of Chinese tie-dye. After she grown up, she found a job in Beijing and she stayed there for many years until she got pregnant. When she came back to her hometown, she felt sad that she was no longer seeing zha-ran everywhere like her childhood memory. So how to make the traditional Chinese tie-dye still alive in our lives became to her goal.

‘Are we really going to watch our traditions dying in front us? Zha-ran supposed to be one of our most proud of tradition that we need to keep it and pass by to next generation.‘

In the end of 2019, Hanmin was invited to be the guest speaker to Open MUJI in Kunming, China. And she prepared a small workshop to the audiences that day.

And then I proposed to her that maybe she can look for more chances to do more workshops in different cities with more brands.

Shukun Duan, the founder of Bai Ethnic Group Tie-dye Museum

The young generation need to know their ‘root’, the history, the culture which bring them to today.

When I was having this interview with Shukun, I was impressed by his passion of zha-ran, the Chinese tie-dye technique.

As the first national Zha-ran textile museum, Puzhen Museum is not only a place to preserve all Chinese tie-dye traditions, but an important platform to attract more people come to know about zha-ran.

So my intervention idea is can we use the museum as a place to hold workshops for young talents who wants to learn about Chinese tie-dye?

During the conversation with Shukun, he told me that there is around 50,000 to 60,000 young people come to visit the museum each year and there is around 10,000 among them are willing to learn how to make zha-ran.

And during the lock-down, the museum had to shut down without any choices. So I was proposing to make some videos online to show the museum.

Shukun said, he believes young generation has to come to really try to make tie-dye with them and they could understand how amazing of zha-ran textile.