Wedding Banners

Wedding Banners likely depicts the tall vertical cloth banners traditionally carried in East Asian wedding processions, drawn from observations Lum made during her residence in Beijing, where she relocated parts of her practice in the 1920s. Such banners — long strips of dyed silk or cotton suspended from poles — present a particular printmaking challenge, as their flat planes of saturated color must read against architectural or figural elements without losing their decorative weight. Lum would have addressed this through carefully registered color blocks printed in succession on dampened washi, with the keyblock outlining figures and banner edges. The composition probably emphasizes the verticality of the banners against a more horizontal grouping of celebrants. Wedding Banners reflects Lum's turn toward Chinese folk and ceremonial subjects, a shift that distinguished her from contemporaries who remained focused on Japanese themes. It belongs to a sequence of works in which she documented ritual life observed firsthand, blending nishiki-e techniques learned in Tokyo with iconography drawn from her adopted Chinese surroundings.