Threading Inwards
Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textiles, Hong Kong

Since its invention, fabric has been fundamental to human existence: we are swaddled in it from birth to death, our bodies—and, by extension, our consciousness—covered, protected, contained. As cloth wraps around us like a second skin, it mediates our sensory experience and our perception of the world. “Threading Inwards” at Hong Kong’s Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textiles (CHAT) examines the generative logic of this medium and how it produces abstract relationscapes that bear upon our collective psyche. 

The show opens with a procession of spectral monuments dispersed along an anterior corridor. Handsewn from white cotton and stained with Korean meok ink, the biomorphic sculptures in Sang A. Han’s Threshold 1 (2024) range from orchid-crowned arches to domed or tapering towers resembling the Buddhist stupa. Traditionally used to enshrine sacred relics, these structures are instead stuffed with cotton from donated dolls, tenderly safeguarding and revitalizing memories of childhood play. 

In the main gallery, Hu Yinping’s Soul Bottles (2026) comprise a constellation of quaint and colorful vessels—pickle jars, travel mugs, and flasks—made of wool, cotton, and wire, arranged atop a mat on the floor. The pieces stem from her long-running “Hu Xiaofang” project—for which the artist engages hundreds of craftswomen from her hometown and nearby rural areas in textile-based communal work—and foreground the East Asian belief that urns harbor the spirits of the deceased. Hu shared with the women myths from various cultures about the afterlife, inviting them to imagine different forms of “paradise” through crocheted forms. Adorned with fruits, vegetables, fish, and dragons, the Soul Bottles transcend mere objecthood as they limn portraits of inner subjectivity, domestic labor, and community ritual.