Ya-chu Kang’s art project focuses on the contemporary world map of textile production. She builds a foundation comprising travel, translation, research, writing, and publication of the art of weaving culture from different countries, and uses her consistent approach of live interviews to produce eleven large-scale computerized jacquard textile paintings at Siao-Long Cultural Park, creating a tapestry interweaving imagination and historical reality that is accompanied by disused weaving machines. The exhibition shows installations constituted of wood, fabric, cotton, thread spools, and straw mattresses, together with maps, timeline, and the enormous Dirt Carpet #10 – Mian-bei displayed directly on the floor, which reveals print patterns, zipper patterns, and lace crochet patterns of blankets delineated by using a mixture of sugar and salt. The exhibition touches upon the central artistic subject of contemporary weaving and textile, and re-assembles the weaving machines that we have grown unfamiliar with or simply abandoned. (Commentator/GONG Jow-Jiun)

Comprising five chapters, “Cotton Research Project” weaves together historical facts and stories of multiple centuries, and speaks about the production procedures in the cotton industry, as well as the connections between cotton and local cultures. Different temporalities and spatial nodes crisscross in the project, including Kang’s field research and creative projects in Taiwan, India, Manchester (UK), and Hong Kong. The project produces a tapestry interwoven with the longitudinal thread that is the past recorded in historical literature and the latitudinal thread of stories of contemporary society, industry and nature, life and tales, trade and immigrants.

Ya-Chu Kang is an interdisciplinary mixed media artist. Using trajectories of weaving fiber threads as a path of thinking, she investigates cultural and social phenomena through field research and self-reflection, while converting her art practice into a way of questioning social issues, such as globalization and the relationship between human beings and nature. Building on global cultural history of weaving and contemporary social behavioral appearances, her work discusses the relationship among skills of workmanship and physical labor, living condition, migration, economic trade, and social structure, through which she further examines and interrogates the vicissitudes and interwoven tapestry of global and local cultures.