Ge Ba, literally meaning “fabric collages”, are handcrafted com- positions made from scraps of textiles or worn clothing, patiently assembled using rice glue. Originally intended for strictly utilitarian purposes — such as reinforcing soles, lining garments, or serving as a base for embroidery — these humble creations from rural daily life now reveal their full visual power, marked by formal intuition and chromatic harmony.
These fabrics reflect the emblematic colors of everyday life in China: indigo, brown, and black, traditionally worn by the working class; meticulously patterned floral prints reserved exclusively for children; block-printed hemp; silk with a “sharkskin” texture; and even fragments of calligraphy that survived the Cultural Revolution.
It is striking to observe how female workers from southwestern China were able to transcend the traditional craft of patchwork, creating bold compositions that share the same aesthetic qualities as the works of Western avant-garde artists from the same era.
Created without any conscious aesthetic intent, the Ge Ba fascinate with their visual proximity to major names in Western abstraction: their materiality evokes Nicolas de Staël, their color fields recall Serge Poliakoff, and their visual rhythms echo the dreamlike com- positions of Paul Klee. Mostly made by rural women in the 1950s, they reflect an intuitive, anonymous form of creation, rooted in collective memory and resourcefulness.
The present collection brings together 76 Ge Ba, all acquired by the collector’s father from François Dautresme (1925-2002), founder of the CFOC (Compagnie Française de l’Orient et de la Chine), a pioneering and passionate figure of Chinese folk art. A refined aesthete and tireless collector, Dautresme was among the first to reveal the richness of these everyday objects to Western audiences, exhibiting them not merely as ethnographic artifacts, but as true works of art.

These Ge Ba form a remarkable selection from an overlooked chapter of Chinese textile heritage — straddling the lines between Art Brut, ethnography, and pictorial modernity. Silent witnesses to an art without artists, these pieces of fabric, humbly sewn or glued together, become, in our contemporary gaze, compositions of deep visual poetry.