Threading Inwards at Hong Kong’s Chat Turns Textiles Into Portals of Memory and Belief
A pale fabric gate greets visitors at the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Chat) in Hong Kong, its surface marked by the soft bleed of ink. The work, “Threshold 1(2024)” by Korean artist Sang A. Han, is made from white cotton stained with meok (Korean ink), and it sets the tone for “Threading Inwards,” a group exhibition that treats cloth not as décor or craft, but as a conduit between the material world and the unseen.
Beyond Han’s entrance piece, shrine-like soft sculptures rise in pagoda-like forms. Each is stuffed with cotton filling collected from donated dolls, a gesture that folds private histories into a communal offering. Wang Weiwei, Chat’s curator of exhibitions and collections and a co-curator of the show, describes the threshold as a “portal” that invites viewers into a spiritual register beyond daily life. The dolls, she notes, are meant to prompt an imaginative leap: to picture the joy, playfulness, and blessings they once carried.
That sense of textiles as sacred vessels has deep roots across Asia, where cloth has long been used in ritual, performance, and funerary practice. “Threading Inwards” takes this lineage as its point of departure, bringing together 14 artists from the region working across painting, video, photography, and textile. Wang organized the exhibition with three co-curators: Seoul-based Eugene Hannah Park, Tokyo-based Kurosawa Seiha, and Beijing-based Wang Huan. The team focused on emerging to mid-career voices, building a roster that moves between personal memory and broader cultural rupture.
Park frames the project as a response to historical dislocation. The relationship between textiles and spirituality, she argues, has been “contaminated” by Westernization, modernization, and colonization across different national contexts. In conversations with artists, the curators found the subject inseparable from what has been lost: not only techniques and symbols, but ways of understanding “ancestral cosmology” and the self.
The exhibition’s range is deliberately wide. It includes monumental, site-specific tapestries by Malaysian-born artist Marcos Kueh and anthropological photographs by Kyoto-based Korean diaspora artist Kim Sajik, positioning textile culture as both lived practice and a field of study.
One of the show’s most pointed meditations on inheritance and constraint comes from London-based Uzbek artist Aziza Kadyri. Her installation incorporates artificial intelligence and is rooted in her grandmother’s unrealized ambition to become a traditional folk dancer in Soviet-era Uzbekistan. In a two-channel video, contemporary choreographer Shirin Jalilova’s fluid movement is set against the restricted gestures of Kadyri’s elderly grandmother navigating her apartment today. Nearby, large suspended fabric sculptures translate dance into volume: shell-like forms made from upholstery fabric that visitors can step into, turning spectatorship into embodied experience. “Costume can be a carrier of memory,” Kadyri says, emphasizing that the work is meant to be felt physically, not only understood intellectually.
Multisensory strategies recur throughout the exhibition. Balinese artist Citra Sasmita’s “Sky River in Fountain of Amygdala (2026)” pairs a monumental textile with bags of fragrant herbs, extending the work into scent and atmosphere. Created in collaboration with a weaving community in Tumanggal, Central Java, the piece draws on Balinese funerary rites in which the body is wrapped in cloth to help guide the soul onward.
The exhibition concludes with “Chloronest (2026),” an immersive installation by Hong Kong-based artist IV Chan. Inspired by the idea of a green room as a backstage refuge, Chan lines a large alcove with soft green fabric and populates it with fabric sculptures referencing ancient gods and deities. Visitors are invited to touch the forms, shifting the gallery from a space of distance to one of contact. Wang describes the installation as a site of transformation: a place to calm the body and imagine what one might become.
In “Threading Inwards,” textiles operate as more than medium. They become thresholds, shelters, and mnemonic devices, carrying the weight of ritual while remaining insistently present as fabric: stitched, stuffed, draped, and worn. The exhibition is on view at Chat in Hong Kong through June 28, offering a quietly insistent argument that cloth can still hold spiritual charge, even amid contemporary uncertainty.
