“Walking Over the Bridge in a Willow Pattern Plate” by Serena Wong and Joanne Ning is a chinoiserie-style painted pottery plate that draws inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s 1913 review of Pu Songling’s classic short story collection Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures. Borrowing from the last line of the review, which also gives the plate its title, Wong and Ning combines literary theory with crafting practice to explore Woolf’s engagement with Chinese aesthetic culture. The pattern of the plate depicts the four stories that Woolf particularly references in her review, which are “The Ghost in Love”, “Through Many Lives”, “The Spirit of the River”, and “The River of Sorrows”.

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‘So queer and topsy-turvy is the atmosphere of these little stories that one feels, when one has read a number of them, much as if one had been trying to walk over the bridge in a willow pattern plate.’ — Virginia Woolf, in her review of Pou Song-Ling’s Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures as translated by George Soulié.