About Ming Green
Ming Green is a textile design firm in Cape Town, South Africa. We sell upholstery and curtaining fabric by the metre, as well as select products made from it, both directly to the public and to the trade. All of our fabrics are screen printed domestically on locally produced, 100% natural base cloths using water-based pigment inks.
Our aim is to provide sophisticated but relaxed prints at a more affordable price than imported alternatives. Explore our catalogue, which is small but growing steadily. We hope you will discover something that resonates with you or your clients.
In a nutshell
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Romance
We took our name from a short 1966 film by Gregory Markopoulos: a rhythmic montage of flashes and fades recording his Greenwich Village apartment in anticipation of his leaving. Familiar rooms and personal belongings are transmuted into light, edited into memory in-camera.
Like film (and books), textiles can carry you far away in time and place. There’s history and geography in fabric, and, for Ming Green, there’s the romance of the half-forgotten or neglected, the faded and ephemeral.
Lucky auction finds, password-protected digital archives, a collector’s obscure magnum opus. Scraps and fragments with gaps to be guessed and pasts imagined. Our fabrics have all, to date, originated in these places, in this way. They’re researched, then redrawn and respectfully reimagined for now.
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Heritage
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations,” Orson Welles once said. That intuition rings true to us, and it’s one reason we prefer to use screen printing, despite the benefits of digital on-demand.
The screen dictates everything from the scale at which you work to the number of colours you print. Each choice is a tradeoff to be approached with creative ingenuity, and it’s humbling to see how cleverly designers continue to respond to every new question the medium raises.
Most of all, we believe that our devotion to the hands-on printmaking tradition is repaid in the authentic, artisanal touch and tactile richness of our fabrics, which are all printed on locally produced linens and cottons. We’re certain that you will feel it too.
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Adventure
We’ll be honest. It had been a while since we’d truly loved what we were doing. And what we’re doing now is very new to us, if you discount some years of fine art printmaking at university and a collection of textiles (and books on textiles) assembled over two decades.
Of course, we do apply some of our professional experience daily in this new venture, but coming from industries being transformed by AI very rapidly, it’s the opportunity to really engage with the material that comes as such a welcome change.
To pore over sources, to research unfamiliar motifs, to draw by hand, to explore palettes in gouache, to handle base cloths – to meet and work with printers and makers all over our city – feels like a gift to two fairly risk-averse and retiring former knowledge workers
