In “Eastern Charm Awakens, Where Art Meets Silk,” Vancouver’s Angela Tse and her mother, designer Rebecca Xu, turn 24 childhood brush paintings into 15 wearable works. Free at the International Art Museum of America through Aug. 2.
A steam clock, a canopy of autumn maples, a family walking a quiet path — the scene began as a 10-year-old’s ink painting on rice paper. At the International Art Museum of America on Market Street, it now hangs off the shoulders of a hand-tailored qipao, worn by the young artist herself.
That leap — from brush and paper to silk and thread — is the heart of “Eastern Charm Awakens, Where Art Meets Silk,” a mother-and-daughter exhibition on view free to the public at IAMA through Aug. 2. It pairs the award-winning Chinese brush paintings of Vancouver fourth-grader Angela Tse with wearable pieces by her mother, the Canadian interdisciplinary fashion designer Yuan Yuan (Rebecca) Xu, who reinterprets each painting as a garment you could, in theory, walk out the door in.
The show is built on a simple, appealing structure: 24 of Angela’s original paintings become 15 garments, presented “one painting, one piece.” Hang a landscape beside the dress it inspired and the conversation between them becomes obvious. The layered ridgelines of a mountain village turn into the sculptural line of a shoulder; a sweep of dry, feathered brushwork reappears as an asymmetric ruffle along a hem.
Xu approaches her daughter’s work almost like an architect, pulling out line, proportion and color and rebuilding them in three dimensions. She works in silk, satin, gauze and linen, uses digital printing to carry over the exact bleed and wash of Angela’s ink, and answers small details in the paintings with embroidery and beadwork. “I don’t copy the painting,” Xu says. “I let the garment become another form of the painting’s existence.”
The exhibition’s centerpiece is a painting called “Misty Ancient Town.” Angela’s rendering of a southern-Chinese river town — rooftops stacked above stone stairways, villagers moving through the lanes — took first place in the ages 7–10 category at IAMA’s 2024 International Youth Art Competition. Mother and daughter then extended it into a couture qipao, mist spilling down the body and the old town surfacing through beadwork and careful tailoring. That gown was later chosen as the official qipao for the grand final of the 2025 Miss Chinese Vancouver pageant.
For all the polish of the finished garments, the paintings are unmistakably a child’s — and that is the point. Angela has loved drawing and clay since she was small, and began studying Chinese brush painting under Master Shen Heng in 2022. At 10, her résumé is already long: gold and first-place finishes at international youth competitions over three consecutive years, including back-to-back honors at IAMA’s youth contest. At five, she co-created and illustrated a children’s picture book, “Mr. Crab’s 24 Amazing Days,” whose auction and fundraising proceeds went to B.C. Children’s Hospital. In 2025 she was commissioned to paint Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge for the Miss Chinese Vancouver pageant, an image that was then worked into the contestants’ gowns.
Her subjects come from the world close to her — nature, family, cultural heritage and the city she lives in — and Xu’s designs are careful to keep that spirit intact rather than smooth it away. The result is less a designer borrowing a cute motif than two artists, a generation apart, actually talking to each other.
The museum hosting them is a fitting match. Founded in 2010, the International Art Museum of America sits in San Francisco’s Central Market district, near the cable-car turnaround and Civic Center, in a stretch of the city long associated with theater, literature and the arts. IAMA runs on the mission of making art appreciation and education accessible to everyone, offering programs to schools and the community year-round, and its annual International Youth Art Contest — the same contest Angela has won — gives young artists an international stage. Angela is exactly the kind of emerging voice that mission is built to encourage: a child unafraid to express herself and to be heard through her art.
Ask the two of them about working together and the roles blur. “We are each other’s best teachers,” Xu says — her daughter’s fearlessness keeps breaking her out of her design habits, while her own experience helps Angela bring wild ideas down to earth. Asked what they’d most like to say to each other, Angela grins and calls her mother “the most powerful magician.” Xu’s answer: “Thank you for teaching me to see the world again through a child’s eyes.”
It is also, quietly, the exhibition’s message to everyone who walks through it. Art, mother and daughter hope visitors will remember, has no age limit and no single correct form — and each of us can find our way back to the child inside who dares to imagine and isn’t afraid to speak up.
If You Go
“Eastern Charm Awakens, Where Art Meets Silk” runs through Aug. 2 in the Lightspace Gallery on the second floor of the International Art Museum of America, 1025 Market St., San Francisco.
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Admission is free.
Details: https://iamasf.org/art/exhibitions/eastern-charm-awakens-where-art-meets-silk/