Art Basel Hong Kong 2024, March 30

Social Fabrics: Weaving as Art Form

false

Yee I-Lann, artist, Silverlens Qualeasha Wood, artist, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery Yuki Kihara, interdisciplinary artist, CHAT exhibition 
Moderated by Mizuki Takahashi, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile (CHAT) 
 
 
 
The art of weaving has long been a tradition of social cohesion: a creative act that produces textiles that are worn, used, or displayed in public and private spaces to signal identities, tell stories, express traditions, and build relationships. The craft’s transmission is a negotiation of identity, community and history: a unique process that artists will discuss in relation to their own practices. 

Yee I-Lann is one of Southeast Asia’s leading figures in the visual arts, participating in major international exhibitions since the 1990s. Her primarily photomedia-based practice, often situated at the shifting nexus of power, colonialism, and neo-colonialism in Southeast Asia, explores the impact of historic memory in social experience, often with particular focus on counter-narrative ‘histories from below.’ In recent years, she has started working collaboratively with sea-based and land-based communities and Indigenous mediums in Sabah, Malaysia. 
Qualeasha Wood lives and works in Philadelphia. Wood has exhibited at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte (2024); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2023); Kendra Jayne Patrick, New York (2023); Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, New York, and LA (2022-3), and MoMA PS1, New York (2022). Work by Wood is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rennie Collection, Vancouver; Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 
Yuki Kihara is an artist based in Sāmoa. From a Pacific-Indigenous perspective, Kihara challenges dominant and singular historical narratives through performance, sculpture, video, photography, and curatorial practice. Kihara’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, including a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008. Kihara represented Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and participated in the 2023 Gwangju Biennale. Kihara’s work is currently on view at the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile in Hong Kong. 
Mizuki Takahashi is Executive Director and Chief Curator of CHAT, Hong Kong’s textile heritage museum which opened in 2019. She directs CHAT's curatorial programmes to interweave contemporary art, design, craft and industrial heritage through a textile lens, and supervises collections, outreach, and partnership programmes with museums and institutions in Hong Kong and abroad. Her major curated exhibitions, in Japan and abroad, including “8 Days - Beuys in Japan,” 2009, “Quiet Attentions: Departure from Women,” 2011, “Jung Yeondoo: Just Like the Road Across the Earth,”2014, , “Unfolding: Fabric of Our Life,” 2019, “Unconstrained Textiles: Stitching Methods, Crossing Ideas,”2020, “Interweaving Poetic Code,” 2021, “Yee I-Lann: Until We Hug Again,” 2021, “Jakkai Siributr: Everybody Wanna be Happy”, 2023. The Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 Conversations program is curated by Stephanie Bailey.

From Hong Kong to Basel, dive into our rich archive of talks and debates, featuring leading voices of the art world and beyond