SFTW Online Exhibition, Leeds Industrial Museum

To coincide with 2021 Chinese New Year celebration, Leeds Industrial Museum is hosting online exhibition of six short documentary films created by our project partners in China.

Each documentary tells the interwoven evolution of Shanghai All-Female Yueju and the Shanghai Textile Industry from their initial formation in the early 20th century to post-industrial new millennium digital transformation. The patronage of the textile female workers saw the development of their hometown folk singing to become a modern theatre - Shanghai all-female Yueju.

Leeds and Hangzhou are twin cities; Hangzhou, the capital city of Zhejiang province where the majority of Shanghai female textile workers along with the yueju singers originated from.

The digital exhibition is the first step of an ambitious project which aims to evoke the shared memories of post-industrial transformation between the UK and China as a way to bridge understanding of the UK-China audiences and communities.