Co-Directors’ Foreword 聯席總監前言

Artist Statement by Taguchi Yukihiro 田口行弘的創作自述

CHAT’s Artist-in-Residence programme launched in December 2015. Through our curatorial team’s work with local art organisations, communities, schools and cultural practitioners, CHAT’s resident artists are encouraged to further their artistic development through the cross-fertilisation of ideas, media and perspectives. This experience usually stokes new inspiration in the artists, encouraging them to explore alternative ways of thinking and experimental methods to realise their new artworks, which are exhibited at CHAT. The artists are also offered the opportunity to discuss their experiences in public workshops and talks.

Taguchi Yukihiro is CHAT’s second Artist-in-Residence, with a residency lasting from September to December 2016. Taguchi’s practice, which involves deriving inspiration from unpredictable encounters with everyday objects and people on the streets, met with new challenges in Hong Kong’s uniquely dense cityscape and history. This yielded a new curiosity about textile techniques such as patchwork and weaving that Taguchi conducted with residents on the streets of Tsuen Wan. He also researched the common traditional customs of the city. Spontaneous events and workshops engaged with the public, leading to improvised street art. Taguchi also captured the way space, people and atmosphere change with his digital camera, creating stop-motion animations using countless digital still photographs.

His new interest in textiles also intertwined with his zero-waste commitment during the residency with the creation of Patch Pass, a work made of a patchwork of fabric from the discarded umbrellas found on the streets of Hong Kong after heavy typhoons. This sparked continuous reinterpretation by Taguchi of textile-related metaphors in his practice. Our conversations with Taguchi developed further after his residency in 2016, culminating in his return to Hong Kong in 2018 for the Spun Dragon project. Students and families in CHAT’s neighbourhood were invited to bring old T-shirts and weave the body of a dragon with them. The result was Spun Dragon, consisting of 31 colourful woven cubes, with a dragon’s head made using Taguchi’s hand-made bamboo loom. Spun Dragon was exhibited and performed to celebrate the start of CHAT’s pre-opening summer programme, choreographed by a local fire dragon dance master.

One of our goals is always to build a long-term relationship between resident artists and Hong Kong public. A residency might only be three months but that is only the start. After that we take that special relationship with our artists to the next level and into the future, spurring new interpretations, developing the artists’ practices and, most importantly, sharing that creative energy with the Hong Kong public through CHAT’s inclusive programmes.