The sight of these positive creatures were often associated with good news: one story recalls that a mother, waiting for her son to return from a long journey, finds a spider crawling on her clothes soon after her son arrives. In ancient China, spiders were referred to as ' ximu' or ‘happy insects'. The spider and its web hold many auspicious associations in Chinese culture. “Because my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat, and as useful as a spider.” As her celebrated sculpture Spider IV comes to auction in Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction (27 April, Hong Kong), we look at some of ways people and cultures have contended with all the captivating and formidable characteristics of the polarising eight-legged creature. “The spider-why the spider?” Bourgeois wrote in her 1995 book Ode à Ma Mère. Images of the spider recur throughout Louise Bourgeois’s work, signifying aspects of her childhood and relationship to her mother, a tapestry restorer. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, foolhardy Arachne challenges Minerva to a duel on the loom, only to be transformed into a spider and forced to weave for eternity. From Buddha to Picasso | Five Icons from Across Time and Spaceĭespite this, spiders have held varying symbolic meanings through history and culture, both positive and negative, inhabiting oral traditions, literature, poetry, as well as art.
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