Born to Create: How Rebecca Xu Turns Memory, Heritage, and Motherhood Into Art

By Dr. Mark A. Rafter, Editorial Director

Some people study creativity. Others seem to carry it from birth. Sitting with Yuan Yuan Rebecca Xu, I kept coming back to the same image: a little girl in China, falling asleep to the hum of her mother’s vintage sewing machine. Her mother’s one wish — if she ever had a daughter, she would sew her beautiful clothes by hand — became the opening note of everything Rebecca has done since.

The trouble with a subject like Rebecca is knowing what to leave out — a lifetime of work could fill an issue. But her story was never really about the count. It is about the reason she keeps making things, and the thread that runs through all of it.

She grew up close to her parents — a father who was an educator, a mother she adored, a younger brother — and after both her parents passed, those values moved forward with her, into her own motherhood and into the work she now creates beside her talented daughter, Angela.

Ambition did as much as talent to get her here. While working in China, her potential was noticed and she was given the chance to finish her design education. She graduated from Shantou University in Graphic Design, and her alma mater has since collected her work. In 2001 she immigrated to Canada as an Art Director, built graphic design companies in China, Canada and the United States, and served as Design Director for Reader’s magazine in North America. Advertising, logos, sourcing, runway music and video — she did it all, sometimes as a one-woman team.

Three decades on, her work has moved from graphic design through architecture and into fashion, but she refuses to treat them as separate worlds. Creativity, she says, has no boundaries — it just finds different forms. Her design philosophy runs on three convictions. First, fashion must be authentic and wearable: clothing should speak to the body, balancing visual impact with ease of movement. Second, the compositional eye of a graphic designer belongs in a garment. Third, sustainability is not a slogan; it lives in how you cut a pattern and reuse fabric.

Her latest collection, Chaoyuanmeng, brings all of this home. It pairs her designs with Angela’s hand-painted Chinese ink paintings, the flowing brushwork transferred onto silk and satin — a conversation between East and West, and between two generations.

Chinese heritage runs through much of her recent work. One piece, a Suzhou hand-embroidered silk artwork called “Treasured Steeds,” draws on the imperial horse-painting tradition of the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty — the same era when court artist Giuseppe Castiglione, known in China as Lang Shining, fused Western realism with Chinese brushwork. Reworked in fine mulberry silk thread, it honors the symbolism of the horse — strength, courage, prosperity, forward progress — and keeps the craft of Suzhou embroidery alive.

The honors have followed. Rebecca was recognized as one of Canada’s Top 10 Outstanding Women in 2019 and received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal. She has received awards from Canada’s Member of Parliament Peter S. Julian and Senator Victor Oh, and from Guy P. Djoken, Executive Director, CEO and President of the UNESCO Center for Peace — an award she shared with Angela.

But much of what matters to her never happened on a stage. For roughly a decade she devoted herself to being a wife and mother, supported by her loving Canadian husband, and creativity simply found new rooms. She fell in love with miniature food art and passed the passion to her daughter. She also took up writing in Chinese, documenting her children’s early years in about 5,000 pages across 24 books of photographs and illustrations — a record she is now compiling into two books. And though she never formally studied architecture, she designed houses and built models by hand, learning as she went.

Now a Hong Kong film producer has approached her about a movie. After reading the screenplay, Rebecca began writing her own — a story about a fashion designer that weaves together her two growing fascinations, artificial intelligence and fashion. The director responded positively and planned to travel to Vancouver to discuss developing it with her.

Rebecca has a line she lives by: “As long as you have a dream to chase, success or failure does not have to determine whether you take that first step. What matters is that you dared to move forward.”

When we met, she told me something I will not forget. “I believe that people come into our lives for a reason. It’s all part of God’s plan. I never push myself into anything. If things feel right and go smoothly, I just keep going. Just like you and I meeting. That was no coincidence.”

As the Modern-Day Marco Polo, I have learned that building bridges between cultures only requires caring enough to try and listening enough to understand. Treasure is not always gold or silver; sometimes you find it in another person. This time, it was a talented and kind-hearted new friend, Yuan Yuan Rebecca Xu, with plans for future creative projects together — Angela’s remarkable talent joining the journey. The first step, as Rebecca would say, is already taken.

Readers interested in exploring more of her work can visit her website, Yuandream.com.