September 20, 2026

Ebba Hägne: We Are Meeting Each Other on the Bridge

Yul Cho & Lois Ding in Conversations with Ebba Hägne

Ebba Hägne (YangJiQiuZhen) is a Swedish-Chinese multidisciplinary illustrator, artist and art teacher based in Stockholm. Having grown up between Sweden and China, she draws on her multicultural heritage throughout her practice, where community care and in-betweenness serve as two central pillars. Alongside her own work, Ebba leads collective embroidery and printmaking workshops, where making together becomes a way of thinking, talking and caring for one another.

We met Ebba on a Sunday afternoon at the studio that MAAPS shares. She brought several works with her and unfolded them one by one. From these pieces, the conversation moved from what it means to borrow from two craft traditions, the labour and care held in textiles, the difficulty of translating between cultures, and what it means to find a place between them. 

EBBA: Here’s some embroidery I did, which was what I used to make the typeface. I hand-embroidered the whole alphabet to make a digital typeface, and this is the piece that is part of the work 49 Days, which was both this key and then two pieces of textile – I would call them flags. I was looking at traditional embroidery training cloth that young girls did in Skaraborg in Sweden. And then I tried to copy the kind of style. I scanned it to turn it into a typeface I could use.

Because I have an illustrator / graphic designer background, a lot of my work has that kind of sentiment or method. I wanted to make a typeface that I could use to tell stories about my in-between background. And I found it so hard to find a typeface that I thought worked for me. I never felt like a typeface person; I felt more like a drawing kind of person. Then I thought, okay, I should just make this, and then I can say all the things I want to say.

And I thought it was interesting to translate using something like “marking cloth,” this kind of thing young girls used to use to practice their embroidery skills from the 1700s to 1800s. And some of them, you can see, at the bottom they’ll write their names and ages, so I wrote mine as well – this is my Chinese name. And on this key it says: “And I remember how it felt when I swallowed the key, or maybe the key was what I needed to open up.”

This is a combination of traditional embroidery styles that I found in a book about Guangzhou and Chinese embroidery styles, so I wanted to combine that with the Swedish typography. Some of them are my own designs, and some are more traditional embroidery patterns. Maybe this was the beginning of me trying to experiment with combining Swedish embroidery with Chinese embroidery from my original background. My grandma is from Sichuan, and my Swedish-side family is from Skaraborg.

The flags were inspired by old Taoist flags that I’ve seen at Taoist temples. They have these kinds of hanging bits. The text here has to do with me grieving my grandpa when he passed away. My family are Buddhist, so there are a lot of grieving traditions with a Buddhist background, and that’s also why I wanted to incorporate some religious elements into it. The typeface was directly scanned from my embroidery, and I worked digitally to make it into a working typeface, so I could put it in a Word document and write with it. 

I also have an idea to make a typeface out of the back side of the embroidery, to kind of talk about the labour in embroidery, the invisible work, and maybe things that you don’t want to say. Then you can write it down in this kind of cryptic typeface. I would really love it to be almost like a family, with the back side and stuff, so there are different forms that you can choose.

YUL: I really like how you’re bringing together this hand labour with its digital transformation. You probably know about this history – how weaving and textile technologies played a role in the development of early computing and programming. So I think it’s really interesting that you’re bringing these two things together.

EBBA: Thank you! Yes, I’ve heard about that too, and I think that’s super cool. It’s very interesting how the digital sphere is very male-dominated, but then people don’t hear about how a lot of the early coders were textile workers who used this. So I think that’s a reason why I really want to work with craft and embroidery specifically, from a designer perspective – bringing both my cultures into it, but specifically through a feminist lens to highlight craft and heritage.

For me, maybe because of my multicultural background, I always felt a bit like, “Oh, this is not my thing to use. Maybe I don’t deserve to use something traditional because I don’t know enough about it,” because I come from a middle ground. And I think for me this project was a big examination of that, like, what does it mean? And especially in contrast to how heritage and craft are used in a far-right context, to emphasise nationalism. So that’s kind of my motive for working with this stuff. 

YUL: Because not feeling like you belong wholly to either is also a very important and valid perspective. It feels like there’s often a pressure to put yourself into one specific category, especially in the context of nationalism and the far right. I want to know if you had any interesting feedback from exhibiting this type of work in Sweden.

EBBA: I think something I found very interesting is that people who hear that I draw things from different places are always very shocked, because they’re like, “It looks very similar.” It’s very interesting that we’re saying, “Oh, this is Chinese, and this is Swedish.” I think stuff like that is also interesting – to put this kind of label on a culture. What does it mean to be Swedish? What does it mean to be Chinese in this context? But a lot of people would say, “Oh, these look similar to each other,” the Swedish and the Chinese parts. And I think that’s something very beautiful about folk art, and specifically embroidery, when you look at these visual languages. 

This key is part of the work 49 Days, and these knots are called jingang knots (金刚结), which are a Tibetan Buddhist knot specifically. Because my family has a Tibetan Buddhist background, that’s why I wanted to incorporate these. And this is a classic Chinese knot that you can actually see in a lot of cultures.

YUL: Does the key have a symbolic meaning to you? 

EBBA: Yeah, for sure. I think for me, a lot of my work is about home-searching, because of the in-betweenness of me as a person and my work. It’s something I constantly think about. What does it mean to have a home? What does it mean to belong somewhere? Can you ever belong somewhere? So for me, a key is a way to open up yourself – because this work has to do with opening up and being vulnerable – but also a kind of home-finding. The other piece actually has an embroidered keyhole, so it makes more sense when the three are together. 

This piece, which is screen-printed instead, is the last work I did before I started making workshops. Screen printing is a traditional printing technique that originated in China. We’ve seen early examples of it from the Ming dynasty, which I only found out about recently. It made me almost a bit angry, because I learned screen printing at a folkhögskola in Sweden when I was 18, and nobody said a word about it. I was thinking: hmm, interesting, convenient that we don’t talk about this stuff, and only talk about Swedish designers and screen printing.

This work was supposed to be a tablecloth. It’s about a first date I went on, through Tinder. On the date, he said to me, “Are you submissive, like the girls I met in Japan?”

I’ve been furious about it ever since. Of course, this happened many years ago. But I wanted to make something about this – yellow fever, the sexualisation, another kind of racism – about Asian women specifically. So I made this tablecloth, and when I exhibit it, I usually have it on a table and set it up like a romantic dinner date, with beer glasses and maybe an ashtray or something like that.

YUL: This is super interesting, because people are so obsessed with Asian women, especially in the West, and then gaslight us into thinking it’s not racist.

It shows so much more about who they are and what they’re projecting onto you. And I really like how the work expresses this kind of feminine rage through something so domestic and traditionally feminine, like embroidery and a tablecloth. 

EBBA: Yeah, and you will see these after a while, when you sit beside the table, and then “Oh! It’s a sentence like this.” A lot of people who come to see it at an exhibition don’t notice at first. Because I invite people to sit down, and people usually see it after quite a long time. This is a work I’ve gotten a lot of really heartwarming responses to, from women across so many different cultures, who have said that it makes them feel less alone, feel a sense of support, and angry, of course. 

We stayed with the tablecloth for a while, talking about the experiences behind the words embroidered into it. This led us to dating, and to the difficulty of knowing whether someone is responding to you as a person or to an idea of Asian women. Ebba described how this uncertainty can turn into self-surveillance, while also recalling that she encountered a different version of the same problem while living in China, where she was read as more “Western” and therefore supposedly more “open-minded.” 

We then began talking about what happens when these experiences meet a culture that doesn’t always have the language for talking about race. 

EBBA: I just can’t win. Everything I date is a political discussion. And the sexualisation of what I am as a person – which of course exists for all women. But for Asian women right now, as you said, it’s very untalked about. It’s very taboo. And again, I think it goes into the stereotype of people assuming maybe you won’t talk about it, because we’re seen as soft and submissive and flexible, almost. 

LOIS: Maybe some people will think this kind of dating experience is too personal, like you shouldn’t make a big thing out of it. But I think it’s about more than dating. It’s about how other people see Asian women, especially Asian women in the Western world.

YUL: Do you [Ebba] feel like there’s space for these kinds of conversations in Sweden? I’m wondering how much of it is about whether people even have the words for these experiences, or whether there’s a kind of colourblindness that makes them harder to see.

EBBA: They don’t see colour. And they think not seeing colour makes them a better person. I think it has a lot to do with that – the idea of political correctness, that you’re not supposed to see colour, which can actually be even more racist. When this date happened, I was in an almost exclusively white friend group at the time, and I remember talking to friends about it, and people were just like, “Oh, sounds like a weird person.” I was like, “Maybe it’s a bit more.” “Yeah, maybe, but you never know.” 

I think a lot of it starts with discomfort. For a lot of white people, being called racist is one of the worst things you can be. It’s like being called evil. Racism is a verb. Doing racist acts is a verb. It doesn’t necessarily define you as a whole person. In my experience, when I talk to white people about this kind of stuff, it gets so scary to talk about that they’ll be like, “Yeah, maybe,” or “You never know.” No, no, no. It just is. Maybe he’s a great friend to his white friends, I don’t know – but that doesn’t change the verb, the action of being racist. So it’s interesting talking to white Swedes about this. I find it’s a culture that’s very afraid of conflict.

YUL: And what was it like at Konstfack, as an institutional art space? Was there much room to talk about these kinds of things?

EBBA: I found a few friends at Konstfack who I could speak to about this, as they have similar backgrounds as me. However, altogether I found talking about these subjects to be quite hard, because it’s an overwhelmingly white space. Even though I know many people who work with feminist subjects, when it comes to this kind of stuff, maybe people don’t want to offend you, or they think, “It’s not my place to talk about this. I’ll just listen.” However, my classmates were really good with this. We were an empathetic group of people who could put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes and say, “I cannot understand this from my point of view, but I can try to feel the things that you’re feeling,” by seeing your work and drawing from our own experiences.

And that’s actually why – if I take this chronologically – this was the work that made me start doing workshops with Sino queer, the Chinese queer community in Stockholm. Because I think the people giving me feedback are nice, but I need something more than this. I need my community. So that’s why I started working with Sino queer and doing collective workshops, where I would show my work as well. My workshops usually have to do with themes from my pieces, and then we do embroidery and discuss those themes. For me, that became a huge method for developing my own ideas, bringing them in and talking with other people about them. We work together as a collective, and things that come up there evolve into future work. It becomes like the whisper game.

YUL: That’s so nice. I guess that’s also part of what makes handcraft so special, the way it can bring people together to talk and spend time with each other. 

EBBA: Yeah. I personally was really sad and angry when I was doing this entire work. I felt quite horrible, which was when I started to be like, “Oh, I should stop working alone.” I need to work with other people, because I know it makes me feel better. So it was to kind of support myself, mental-health-wise.

I come from a designer background, and embroidery came for me way later. Actually, when I was a child, I was labelled as quite a restless, clumsy, and ‘the opposite of a detail-oriented’ person. So part of me felt like this wasn’t my thing, I couldn’t do this. But I’m quite a stubborn person. When I feel like I cannot do something, I really want to do it. That’s what led me to embroidery. I think it started with upcycling my own clothes. I’d get holes in my jackets and start filling in the holes, stuff like that. That was my entry point into doing embroidery artistically and bringing it into my work.

A future project I would love to do is to experiment with Chinese paper cutting. There’s this really elaborate paper cutting that people put on windows, and it can be really elaborate designs of mythological creatures. They’re not necessarily symmetrical, and they can be a huge, usually red, rice paper, and you cut it with scalpels and stuff, and then whole scenes. It has a very long tradition as well. So that’s something I would love to experiment with in the future, maybe moving on from embroidery and trying something else.

YUL: It also seems like you’re really interested in the history of craft, and in finding connections between motifs from different cultures and traditions.

EBBA: Yeah, I personally find the combination of the past and now, and the tension it can create, very interesting. Combining modern experiences and stories with things from the past, especially from a women’s labour perspective. To highlight the work that is so invisible. 

I feel like I’m jumping around the subject a lot. But another part of why: before I started doing this, I was doing a lot more digital work, and I personally found it quite frustrating and soulless to work so much digitally – how quickly everything becomes, sitting in front of the computer all day, stuff like that. I wanted to slow down my own process, to spend more time, and to try to show the time that is spent on this work.

YUL: I really relate to what you’re saying about the skill and labour behind craft. There’s so much knowledge, time, and technique involved, but that labour is often overlooked, especially because craft is so associated with femininity.

EBBA: You don’t talk about the labour. It’s also an act of care for everybody else around them, and I find textiles have a similar quality. I love the material because it’s one I personally associate a lot with care, with being taken care of. Like a tablecloth: you set out a tablecloth to make it more cosy for other people. 

As we talked more about care in textiles, the conversation also turned to the people and stories that are carried through them. Ebba’s own family histories often find their way into what she makes.

EBBA: This is another piece. There’s the middle cloth, which combines the front and the back with embroidery. This image is a rendering of a picture from one of those “my first year” baby books. My mom took a picture of it and sent it to me. And something I thought was very funny was that here is a photograph of me as a baby, and then here in Chinese it says, “Today I’m two months old.” It’s not a translation. It just says two different things together. And when I saw it, I thought that this is exactly what I want to do. I don’t want my work to be a translation. I want to tell stories in multiple ways.

When I was making these works, I quite often got feedback from people like, “Who is this for? I’m confused.” And that’s something that can frustrate me about making art in a conventionally white space, where you’re expected to make sure everybody understands your work. I don’t think that’s so important. I would rather my work stand for itself, and whatever aspect of it you get is what I’m interested in, rather than a long explanation to make somebody who’s not from the culture understand every single aspect of my culture. I find that very educational, in a way, to be expected to serve “here’s my culture” on a silver platter, explained in a simplistic, easily digestible way. So that’s a tension I’m trying to work with. I’m not sure I’ve done it the way I want yet, but it’s something I think about.

YUL: Some of the artists we’ve talked to through MAAPS have touched on something similar. There’s often a tension between what you bring with you and what a white art world knows how to make sense of. 

EBBA: For sure. I think that’s very real, and I feel that way a lot too. I think about it a lot from the perspective of being mixed race as well. Sometimes I can fit into a white space, not fully, but differently than other Asian people around me who are less ‘white-passing’. Sometimes people say racist things to me that they would never say to somebody else, because maybe they feel comfortable enough with me. Which is weird, because I don’t feel like I’m like you at all. And I also examine that in my work. I try to steer away from imagining it towards a white gaze as much as possible. And I don’t think it necessarily has to be only the Asian diaspora, either. I’m quite interested in in-betweenness as a whole. It’s so interesting how you can be from so many different places in the world – some of the people I’ve connected with most haven’t even been Asian; they’ve been Latinas, or from other cultures – but the in-betweenness is something that can really connect people beyond continents. 

And because my work has a lot to do with history, naturally people talk to me a lot about nostalgia. That’s something I’ve been quite aware of: the tension of how much I want to work with nostalgia on purpose. A lot of people feel very nostalgic about my work, which I find very beautiful, but it can also become a form of stereotyping, a tokenising of yourself. It’s a tension I still don’t really know the answer to, and I’m trying to work around it. 

YUL: What is this [bridge] drawing? Is it inspired by something historical? 

EBBA: These are from the exhibition of my final master’s project, which was called Yu Hong Qiao, which means "Jade Rainbow Bridge." It’s inspired by my grandma on the Chinese side, who has now passed away. She was from Sichuan and had a very traumatic childhood. One of the last times I visited her was when she first told me where she came from, and it was called Jade Rainbow Bridge, Yu Hong Qiao. She had never talked about her childhood before. I think it was because it was too painful. This illustration is inspired by that conversation – meeting each other on the bridge. I find a lot of my work is an honouring of my family members and their stories, especially my grandma. 

YUL: So it’s almost like you have three generations of women in this work. 

EBBA: Yes! Exactly. Three generations of women meeting. I think that’s what I’m interested in – meeting each other. Right now, I really want that to be the centre of my work: meeting each other with differences and similarities, sometimes in ways you didn’t think you would. Because I think a lot of this can be very universal – you can relate even if you don’t have the exact same background. For me, naming the project Yu Hong Qiao (Jade Rainbow Bridge) was not just an honouring of my grandma, who passed away while I was making these works, but also a way to say that we’re meeting on the bridge. We’re meeting each other, no matter who you are.

That’s also what I really admire about MAAPS and your work. You’re doing so much to find a meeting place for people, both within the diaspora and in a wider conversation, which is so needed – to highlight the Asian diaspora experience in Sweden, which is almost never talked about.

I think a lot about Asian diaspora organising, and why there’s so little of it, at least in Sweden. In Chinese, there’s a saying I think about a lot: 家丑不可外扬. You don’t air your dirty laundry. The dirt stays inside the family, and you don’t say it outside. It was always quite tricky for me, with a lot of tension, to talk about racism. I felt a little like, oh, is this really worth talking about, stirring things up? You just want to be friendly and easygoing and enjoyable to be around, outside of our community. 

And that self-surveillance of “don’t air your dirty laundry” is a reason why I didn’t start working with these things until I was almost 30. And then you start to examine why you haven’t been talking about things that are so important, that so many people experience. 

LOIS: And I think that’s part of why there hasn’t been much of this in Sweden until now. There’s this expectation that if you live in another country, you adapt to its culture, and what you bring with you can easily be overlooked.

EBBA: The Chinese side of my family literally has a thousand-year-old family poem about this. I made work about this poem as well, because I find it really interesting. The poem is about a man called Liu who had eight sons and seventeen daughters, and the sons all went out into the world. The poem says: wherever you go, put down roots and adapt, but never forget your roots. I think that sentiment is so big in Chinese culture. 

And Swedish culture is extremely afraid of conflict. When I think about my Swedish side, or the Swedish people around me, I think a key trait of Swedish culture is being very afraid of conflict. So maybe the combination becomes a perfect storm. But I think it’s very good that it’s being talked about more, and that we’re doing the work.

Much of what Ebba described comes back to the idea of meeting each other, both through her work and in the spaces she creates with others. That idea also comes through in her teaching and workshops, where making becomes a way of working with others.

YUL: Are you still working as a teacher?

EBBA: Yeah, I’m working 80% as a teacher right now, and I really like it. I’m still in the middle of figuring out the ratio between my own practice and teaching. Right now it’s a lot of teaching, which means I’m not doing as much of my own work as I’d like. But I’m also getting so much out of teaching, and it’s really putting into perspective how I want to develop my work further, because this people-connecting, bridge aspect of my work is so important. 

For example, I’m doing a workshop with Grafikens hus where we come up with our own qilin (麒麟), a mythical animal of peace and harmony. It’s a series of workshops where people come, and we try to make our own collective peace animal, and we screen print it, using this hand-printing technique again. I think I’ll also bring more of my own artistic practice into the workshop. That’s the way I want to keep developing the tension between working with people and working on my own.

YUL: Do you feel like your art practice shapes the way you teach, and the skills and tools you bring into your teaching? 

EBBA: For sure. I think that always happens as an art teacher. For me, it’s fundamental to being a good art teacher: to take what I have, nourish myself with my art practice, and bring it to my students. They can really tell when that happens. If I talk about a subject I’m very excited about, that I’ve done a lot of, they can sense it, and usually they get excited too. We make a lot of zines together, and we'll probably do embroidery together in the future. Those are usually the projects they get really excited about in the end, which is very fun.