It all started with a little white lie... An artist created a character named Xiaofang and titled it "a hat supplier for a French company."

The artist, a sculptor called Hu Yinping, invented this intermediary "person" to create more income for her mother, who made very little money knitting hats, but refused to accept any money coming directly from her daughter.

This all happened after a visit from Beijing to her hometown, a small town in Sichuan Province in southwest China in 2015. During that trip, Hu, born in 1983, learned that her mother, Yin Sanjie, had been working hard knitting woolen hats but earned just very little from a local buyer.

Yin told Hu that almost all the women in town were doing the same thing, either full time or part time. Silk reeling used to be a local pillar industry, but since the late 1990s, many workers, mostly women, had been laid off from local silk reeling companies. Knitting hats, as little as it could earn, became a stable source of income as hat buyers would come and pay.

"My mother would complete two large bags of hats a year and still struggle to make ends meet," Hu told Beijing Review. "I didn't think that was worth it."

And so, that same year, Hu, holding a master's degree in sculpture from Beijing's prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts but feeling slightly adrift in the capital city, had found a new purpose. She would help her mother turn yarn into yield.

Tale turns truth

Hu decided to buy the hats from her mother at a higher price. Convinced that her mother would refuse her pay, she invented a French company that "purchases knitted hats from China."

She asked a friend to play the part of the company's manager, Xiaofang. The dynamic duo contacted Hu's mother, offering to provide her with better quality wool yarn and buy the finished hats at a higher price. And so the "Xiaofang Project" was born.

Yin happily accepted the new job, as in addition to higher pay, the "French company" also gave her complete freedom to design the hats. To facilitate communication and financial transactions, Yin also learned how to use a smartphone, making video calls and receiving money transfers on Weixin, China's ubiquitous superapp.

In 2016, Yin completed more than 100 hats in a variety of designs, and Hu hosted a small exposition for the accessories in Beijing.

As an artist who had attended exhibitions both in China and overseas, Hu eventually took the items to Paris for exhibition. The "French company" had made its way to France—at last.

Connections

Most of the knitted hats were green because Hu offered more green yarn than other colors. "Knitting is hard work, green is at least better for the eyes," the sculptor explained.

Yin had some concerns at first because in Chinese, "wearing a green hat" means a person is being betrayed by their spouse or partner. This taunt makes green the least popular color for hats in China. But since these hats were for a "French company," Hu told her mother that the green hat's meaning in China doesn't apply to other countries.

In the project's earliest stages, when a few visitors to the exhibitions wanted to buy the hats, Hu didn't sell them, because she considered the hats to be bearers of her mother's time and memories of that year.

But the requests did lead her to contemplate involving more of her hometown's knitting women in the project and finding a market for their hats.

She learned about St. Patrick's Day, the famous Irish cultural holiday that sees people in the streets decked out in green from head to toe, and successfully got orders of green hats from the festival.

As a result, more women joined the project and began working on the "green hat" orders.

When the knitting group was shown a picture of people wearing their handmade hats at the St. Patrick's Day parade in the Irish capital of Dublin, they were thrilled to have such a connection with a foreign country they had never been to.

Accessories to art

As the hats began to appear at more and more events, Hu began to explore other possibilities for wool yarn products. "I used to feel that art is not something that 'happens' in a small place like my hometown," Hu said. Before this project, her connection to the town was a once-a-year visit during the Spring Festival, China's biggest annual holiday and a time for family reunion. But the yarn had become a bridge of connection.

In early 2017, Hu and "her friend Xiaofang" rented two small shops in the town and turned the space into a knitting women's club. Here, the women can pick up yarn, knit and socialize.

Hu came up with several design ideas, and the knitting collective followed up. Being confined to a small town doesn't stop the women from coming up with interesting ideas, and Hu said what she did was "just help the group 'knit out' their ideas."

A woolen bikini was her first attempt at creative expansion. It was an idea Hu'd had on a beach in Europe. She fabricated a bikini contest on a French beach and asked the women to knit bikinis for it. "Most women in the small town had never even been to a beach," she said. From skillset to mindset, the bikini project really put the women to the test. However, in the end, Hu was amazed by the creativity in the finished pieces. Highways, big radishes, watermelon slices, ladybugs... these patterns not usually seen on bikinis all made it into the final products.

Hu continued to give them more themes and encouraged them to let their imagination run wild. The women knitted colorful art patterns of assorted shapes and shades, such as different cacti in flower pots, as well as castles and cars.

The group chose one among them to be in charge of calculating the quantity and setting the price for each product based on several criteria including size and the complexity of the skills. A large work with skillful patterns can bring the knitter tens of thousands of yuan (thousands of U.S. dollars). "We don't set quota for them," Hu said. "They can pick up the yarn any time they want to knit."

These works have been included in the project's subsequent exhibitions, the most recent of which took place at the Paris Internationale art fair this fall. It was the third time the Xiaofang Project's products were on display in France.

"Our exhibition in France has aroused great interest," Hu said. "An aging population group with the ability to work is a common issue for many countries dealing with [rapid] aging. We hope to help initiate similar projects in France and introduce such working methods there."

So far, "Hu Xiaofang" has become a registered trademark in both China and France. Last year, it made profit for the first time since its foundation. However… The more than 50 knitting women involved in the project still don't know the real story. Hu goes to great lengths to keep Xiaofang's secret, especially from her mother, just in case knowing the truth would make her mother feel pressured.

So when a documentary crew went to her hometown in 2017 to capture the project's story and people on camera, they also had to pretend to be part of the French company.

At the time of writing, Hu was hosting a new exhibition in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province in east China. Unlike the previous exhibitions in galleries, this one was set inside a shopping mall. Called Xiaofang Global Universe Bank, it featured knitted gadgets, including miniature cars, oil paintings and toy machinery.

"It is a wonderful world where everything is made of wool yarn," Hu said.

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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