Material Ties
The Endless Garment artists Huang Po-Chih, Serena Chang, and Chang Yuchen reflect on how family histories steer their work.
Whether we like it or not, we take after our parents in more ways than one: their morals and values, interests and behaviors, quirks and eccentricities inevitably influence our own. Instead of fighting this fact, Huang Po-Chih, Serena Chang, and Chang Yuchen, a few of the artists behind the Pioneer Works exhibition The Endless Garment: Atlantic Basin, incorporate the work and lives of their progenitors into their own.
Huang Po-Chih’s rack of crisp, blue shirts are contextualized by large photographs of young women in Taiwan—including his own mother—who once worked in the factory where the garments were produced, linking objects with the real people who made them. Serena Chang’s spindly stalks of sugarcane are a fantastical reimagining of a bamboo farm in Taiwan where her father grew up. Made of hosiery manufactured by SheerlyTouchYa, a company her parents founded after emigrating from Taiwan to the U.S., the stalks are accompanied by photographs of the warehouse, demonstrating how familial memory and homelands change over time. Chang Yuchen, too, was influenced by her parents’ company in China, a fledgling floral business which prompted Chang to devise a fashion line of her own, Use Value, in which utility and beauty are understood on equal terms.
During February Second Sundays, Serena Chang and Chang Yuchen were joined by interlocutor David Everitt Howe—Broadcast’s Senior Arts Editor—while in March Huang Po-Chih sat down with The Endless Garment curator Jeppe Ugelveig to discuss these works of intergenerational reflection, and to consider how their parents’ struggles and successes reverberate in their own.
—The Editors
Jeppe Ugelvig in Conversation with Huang Po-Chih
Jeppe Ugelvig
A lot of your work is focused on questions of industry, labor, and trade in a globalizing world. And as a multidisciplinary artist, you’ve explored issues such as agriculture and economics, as well as the production and consumption of textiles, which is what I wanna talk mostly about today. Naturally, as the title Endless Garment suggests, this exhibition is about clothes. And you have engaged with clothing as a theme in your work for many years. You were trained as a painter, but I would say today your work is mainly about storytelling. How did you develop over time, between mediums and methodologies?
Huang Po-Chih
When I was young, I was doing a lot of classical painting. But my training in school was actually to be a teacher. I didn’t get involved in the older school’s program, but I started doing graffiti outside for many years.
And then after college, I got involved in new media art. So then I studied it, and began doing several more high-tech things, like learning coding and programming and making lots of audio, visual, and interactive art.
The important turning point was my mother. I was trying to figure out what my art would be, but during that time my mom lost her job. I remember asking, “How are you? Are you okay?” And she said, “Oh, I’m okay—totally okay.” But I knew it wasn’t true.
During that time, I had an opportunity for an exhibition. I had no money to give her, but I invited her to be part of the project as an artist. That was the start of our dialogue and collaboration. I wanted to understand her whole life as a factory worker.
Jeppe Ugelvig
Could you tell us a little bit more about your mom? She makes an appearance in our exhibition as well. There’s a great portrait of her.
Huang Po-Chih
She worked at small-scale factories for most of her life. She also turned our apartment into a small-scale factory. When I was a child, I wasn’t really trying to understand what she was doing. But after she lost her job, it gave me an opportunity to really understand her whole life story and the transformation that occurred throughout her working history.
Jeppe Ugelvig
Actually, that transformation of Taiwan is quite important in our exhibition, which thinks about how histories of industry and supply chains end up being written into people's lives and also people's art. Taiwan makes an interesting appearance in a couple of the works here. To those who may be totally unfamiliar with the economic transformation of Taiwan, could you give a little overview of what you’ve seen in your lifetime, or your mother’s?
Huang Po-Chih
My family background was in farming. In the 1960s, when Taiwan was rapidly shifting from an agricultural society to an industrial one, many young women in the countryside were expected to sacrifice for their family members under traditional ideas that valued sons more than daughters. Some stayed in the countryside to work on the farmland, while others were encouraged by government policy to be part of the basic element of the production line. My mother was no exception. She was asked by her grandparents to give up her right to education, leave the countryside, and become part of the production line.
Jeppe Ugelvig
Could you speak more to the history of textile and clothing production in Taiwan, and what your mother’s story captures about it? You're saying she went from agriculture into factory work, but she also exited from factory work. And that seems to, as I understand it, also be because of bigger changes in the region.
Huang Po-Chih
Within my art practice, I always follow history through its most personal perspectives, such as those of my mother and her friends. For me, it’s very interesting to collect their experiences and bring them together as a storyline.
If I were to ask my mother about the transformation of the garment industry in Taiwan, she’d be unable to answer the question. But she’d say, “Ah, Shenzhen, Shenzhen.” She remembered that the factory moved to Shenzhen. Shenzhen is kind of a key word for her to understand the immigration of the industry.
Jeppe Ugelvig
This question of scale is interesting. That’s why I’m very interested in your work, or one of the reasons, because it asks: How do you tell the story of macroeconomic and political change? Why not through the personal? Or, how much can the personal and the biographical be a part of that story?
I think you play with that question of scale very nicely by emphasizing the very intimate personal story. You kept working on your mother’s story for many years. So, tell me about how that collaboration evolved as an artist and through artworks. What shape did it take?
Huang Po-Chih
A very important element was how she helped me understand the workers on the production line. They are doing the same thing for eight hours, 10 hours, the whole day, but their minds are quite creative. They have to keep their clothes to the same standard, but there’s like a typhoon inside of them—they have lots of imagination but use very limited keywords in case the businessman visits the factory.
We were also interested in clothing labels. My Mom would see “MADE IN USA,” “MADE IN ITALIA,” and the other names of countries she was never able to visit. But by sewing the labels on the garments she was making in Taiwan, she and her friends were mapping these countries together, creating the shared story of the businessman.
Jeppe Ugelvig
Can you tell us about your work from the series, "Blue Elephant"? I understand it began at the Shenzhen Biennial in 2014.
Huang Po-Chih
I had the idea from my dialogue with my mother, because she mentioned that all the factories moved to Shenzhen. In 2014, I had the opportunity to have two exhibitions, in Shenzhen and Taipei. Those exhibitions were linked, to me, as a production line, and I imagined that I was making my mother’s fantasy come true.
She cooperated with the workers based in Shenzhen, and they designed the blue shirts together. In Shenzhen, there’s a worker called Auntie Wu, and she made half of 500 shirts. And then after three months, we shipped all the shirts back to Taipei, and my mother made them into the final product. So my process became about retelling the life stories of these two ladies, even though they were in two different cities, two different countries, and had quite different backgrounds. But they shared the same experience of pain and joy in the factory.
The fabric also became a very important medium for them to bridge with the audience, to talk and share. They were so used to working with that material that making the clothes made them feel more relaxed and more confident.
Jeppe Ugelvig
What I like about this display of the shirts is that these garments look kind of like ready-made clothes—the kind of clothing we see all over the world, that’s always made by someone with a story and a biography. But we don’t have many ways to access that story because the objects keep their secrets, you know. One of the reasons I’m interested in clothing is how it can carry so many histories that don’t reveal themselves on their own.
You seem very aware of this because you really centralize these objects as artifacts. But then you surround them with a lot of other types of media that help with the storytelling, almost as a way to socialize them. Why is it important to you to have these other components like text and image and portraiture when you exhibit this project?
Huang Po-Chih
My project was always based on my writing, and the writing was always the starting point. In my previous projects, I usually just put everything into a book, hoping the audience would read a few pages. But I found it really challenging to get audiences to read. The shirts, pants, photographs, and hand drawings really came slowly from the process of working with my collaborators—especially my mother. It felt very natural. We chose forms and materials that were familiar to them, as a way for them to retell and recall the ordinary stories of everyday life that they had almost forgotten.
Jeppe Ugelvig
Yes. Always a challenge. [laughs]
Huang Po-Chih
This dialogue with my mother became my script for the imagery and video I began putting together. She told me, teasing herself, that she had an “elephant leg” from working such long hours on the production line. So I said, “Oh, you are a blue elephant. Why don’t we take a photo?”
Jeppe Ugelvig
This exhibition, of course, is titled Endless Garment, which basically tries to suggest that the meaning within garment production is never really finished and fixed, but it's always being rewritten. As time goes on, these systems change and the stories change. Your project with your mother is now more than one decade old, and I would love to hear what’s changed in that time, especially because the textile industry has changed so much in the past 10–12 years, even in a Taiwanese context.
Huang Po-Chih
Yeah. My mother actually passed away last year. This is a very important question for me, because she was really my artistic partner. To me, her death is like a download by the earth and the soil. So how can I upload her memory again to share with the others? And the other challenge is that my life archive is gone with her.
As far as the textile industry in Taiwan goes, I think no matter what comes, I’ll still be looking back to the very basic elements: the life stories of the workers. The material may change, and so will the technology, but the media will still be the same. And my question will remain: Who is behind all this media?
Jeppe Ugelvig
That’s a great answer. There will never be such an intimate collaborator as your mother, but these are themes you’ve explored with others, too. Your other work is about many other types of interesting people and workers in Taiwan, but also in other places, like Seoul and South Korea and Hong Kong. How do you feel about replicating your process with strangers? You said yourself that you grew up in these factory spaces, so you had a kind of intimacy with them.
Is it possible to pursue these methodologies with strangers, with people very different from yourself, and other artists even? This show tackles the same question—garment production in Asia—from many different angles. And a big question for me as the curator has been: What can the artist do to open up this question, and in what way?
Huang Po-Chih
Sometimes I like to mix different life stories together. I take things from my mother and her friends, but also from people in Hong Kong, China, and the Saipan Islands. I try to digest them into a fictional story. I find it more interesting to try and be open-minded. You can mix shared experiences together like ingredients, and bake bread with them.
David Everitt Howe in Conversation with Serena Chang and Chang Yuchen
David Everitt Howe
Why don't you go through your works in “Endless Garment” and talk about what people will see if they come to the show? Do you want to go first, Serena?
Serena Chang
Sure. I made these sugarcane stalks that are steel wire armatures wrapped in hosiery from my family's business, SheerlyTouchYa.com.
David Everitt Howe
[laughs] Let’s plug that. Order your high-quality hosiery from SheerlyTouchYa.com! Your family’s hosiery company has a Red Hook connection, right?
Serena Chang
Yeah, my father got into the business very randomly. He met a man who ran Marathon Hosiery, which is what all my works in the exhibition are named after. It was based on Van Brunt Street, and my dad worked there for seven and a half years before he started his own hosiery company.
Chang Yuchen
Jeppe mentioned that the business was originally called Serena.
Serena Chang
Yes, it was. After I was born. [laughs] And I modeled for it as a baby. There’s some crazy packaging, which I’ve kept around. Images and videos of the family business—as well as the factories in Taiwan, where the hosiery is made—form wall collages, which reference manufacturing, labor, and authenticity.
The sugarcane hosiery is held in place by special stainless steel hardware. Then there are these laser-cut, plastic leaves of deconstructed, Mandarin characters in seal script that form fragments of words that ground the stalks. There’s 50–60 of them kind of scattered throughout the exhibition, and they come from my father’s memory of sugarcane fields in Taiwan. Since his childhood, a lot of those fields have been totally cleared out. So the installation is like a dreamscape overlaid with family history, which speaks to colonialism and the rise and fall of industry. Oh, and then there’s a sound work that’s in the hallway, and some images of boxes that I had found at the hosiery warehouse. My dad needed some boxes to match the others, so he just drew on them. I just thought it was very special because I use a lot of his drawings.
David Everitt Howe
Was your interest in the family business a recent phenomenon, or something you’ve always had? What particularly draws you to the factory?
Serena Chang
It was just home for me. I have all these memories there. My parents were working all the time, so they would bring us to the warehouse and me and my brothers would play all day in the pallet racks.
Chang Yuchen
It sounds magical.
Serena Chang
We would build forts, and my mom would give me a wet towel and say, “Just wipe as you climb,” because it was so dusty. [laughs] So that material history has been around for so long that it felt natural to embrace it. When I was younger I was so embarrassed that my family’s company was named Serena. There was a van with my name written on it, and my dad would drive me to school in it. I was mortified. I'd ask him to drop me off far away. And then when we went back-to-school shopping, say in the eighth grade, he would go to the hosiery section and stretch tights to compare their material and quality, it'd just be so embarrassing.
David Everitt Howe
Did your dad ever object to his handiwork being appropriated for your art? Or was he more like, “Do whatever you want”?
Serena Chang
It’s been a process over the last 15 years. My parents come from a part of Taiwan where older generations don’t really talk about their past, like how they lived in a military state in the 1940s and ’50s. As I got older, I became more interested in my heritage and family history. One time my father and I went back to Taiwan and visited all the places where he grew up, like where he was born. It was very sweet. We went to find his childhood home and his elementary school, and he was like, “The road used to be so much bigger.”
My use of his drawings became a nice project for both of us, and I’ve been building off of that since then. He probably just thinks it’s funny that I’m interested in the weird things I find at the warehouse. He’s not thinking about them as sculptures—like the paper clip he turned into a door stopper. But he’s such an artist, the way he makes new things from recycled materials.
Chang Yuchen
I’m just realizing that we’re both children of entrepreneurs, because your work has so much to do with your father’s legacy. My mom owned a flower shop. She had been to art school, and then when she met my dad, she decided to support his painting practice with the store. That was when she—the term is xià hǎi—jumped into the sea…of capitalism. [laughs] It was the first flower shop in the area, and they only had one kind of flower—a plastic rose—and one kind of vase. They would just sell that every day. Over the next decade they started to have fresh cut flowers, and then the whole industry started to grow. I also grew up in the store, taking cash and giving change, packing chocolate and picking up trash, since I was maybe five years old. So I think that explains my fascination with having a brand, or inserting myself in retail situations like Use Value, or coming to Pioneer Works every year for the book fair Press Pray, since I also self-publish. I love the experience of taking cash from someone’s hand and giving them something. It’s a mutual recognition of value, and it’s similar in spirit to David Hammond selling snow balls. It’s not enough when I give something a value, I need a customer to agree that it’s valuable, or together we can also expand the concept of value.
Serena, maybe that’s also why you’re so fascinated with branding. You have Shisanwu, which is your fabrication company. You have Lunch Hour, which is your curatorial initiative. And I know you have some other brands in the making. And I have Use Value for my fashion line, and How Many Books for my publications. I keep having new ideas for new brands. I can’t sustain them, but I want to create them.
Serena Chang
Yeah, totally.
Chang Yuchen
What I'm doing is like a distorted mirror version of what a business should be. I started Use Value in 2016, and at the time I was a hostess in a restaurant, making $13 an hour. I really hated the job. So I asked myself, "Can I ask for $13 dollars an hour for doing things I love, instead of hate?" I thought I could provide some use-value by making a bag or clothes that people could actually wear, instead of my drawings, which are useless. So my interest in the materiality of clothing and participating in the economy on my own terms birthed Use Value. Initially I would spend eight hours embroidering a flower, so I’d multiply eight times 13—which was my hostessing hourly rate—to come up with a selling price of $104 per flower.
David Everitt Howe
Wait, that’s it?
Chang Yuchen
Everything I made between 2016 to 2018 sold instantly. [laughs] Luckily, my value has increased since then.
Serena Chang
I should hope so.
Chang Yuchen
At Printed Matter they paid me $15 an hour. And then I gave an art history lecture for a fashion company, which paid a hundred an hour. In recent years, I have been visiting schools like Yale and Bennington perhaps once a semester, and they pay very generously. Obviously that doesn't reflect my everyday income, but one hour of my life now is $600, so I take that into my calculations. So if a garment was made in 2022 when I had eight jobs, I’ll add up the hourly rate of all eight and then multiply it by the time it took to make it. The price of my garments have really inflated. [laughs]
When Jeppe approached me about “Endless Garment,” I was actually feeling like Use Value’s momentum had really slowed in its 10th year. Not only have things not really been selling, but I just can't make sense of the pricing. The art market is so abstract. Bringing income into consideration just distorts it more. 10 years is a good lifespan for a project, so maybe it’s time to end it. The “Endless Garment” installation is kind of a retrospective, although since the good pieces have sold, you’re seeing an incomplete retrospective. It’s even odd calling it art.
David Everitt Howe
It’s interesting trying to assign a useful value to something as…useless as an artwork, in the sense that an artwork’s use is to be looked at, primarily. It’s in the realm of aesthetics and taste, which is subjective. It doesn't need to function as a wearable object anymore in that case, right?
Chang Yuchen
It’s true, but for me it was really complicated because there was a time when I wanted to argue that they’re beautiful, and isn’t beauty useful? My mom has a flower shop.
David Everitt Howe
For sure. That’s true.
Chang Yuchen
Why do people need flowers? They’re beautiful and they light up a room. Isn't that a utility? That reasoning has always driven Use Value. But after a while that conviction started to soften, so maybe beauty isn’t that useful after all. [laughs]
David Everitt Howe
Or maybe it’s not just about beauty. There’s also something uncanny about, say, the way Serena turns hosiery into a kind of skin, a surface-as-sculpture.
Serena Chang
Without a leg to give it shape, hosiery drapes really beautifully. It reminds me of a cicada's shell or a snake's skin after molting. And I find hosiery’s hollow translucency very attractive. So, I use it to make garments, but they’re not embodied. They're used as a belt, or as decorative linear forms. It took me a long, long time to figure out how to use the dead stock hosiery. The packaging imagery was a no-brainer, since I came from a photographic background. But I had always made things as well. In high school I would put on fashion shows. That was my entry point to art. The high school I went to had a pretty robust art program, so I ended up in the photo room, and started collaging photos onto wearable things. That was how it all started.
But I kept coming back to the materiality of the hosiery. Maybe it was just too personal for too long, and I needed some distance from it. There were also its specific connotations in the art world to femininity.
Chang Yuchen
Like Eva Hesse?
Serena Chang
Yeah, and Sarah Lucas. But I think it was just a slow burn. It takes me a long time until there’s this moment when it just clicks. The sugar cane was actually one of the first times that I was like, “Oh, these are actually perfect. They’re like legs.”
Chang Yuchen
I love them. I first saw them in your solo show at Island Gallery. The whole room was filled with sugarcanes. Some parts were really dense, some more breathable.
Serena Chang
That exhibition had all the stalks, and a drawing that my dad made. That’s what inspired the installation to begin with.
David Everitt Howe
What was the drawing of?
Serena Chang
It was of his memory of a sugarcane field on his best friend’s family farm, which they played in a lot when they were growing up. It’s just these scratchy lines and dashes on a piece of paper, and then he wrote “Sugarcanes.” It looks like Mandarin characters even though it’s all caps. It’s very freehand and messy, but I think there’s something special about it. He’s always like, “I’m not an artist. Why do you want me to draw?”
When we went to visit the farm in person, he had these vivid memories of a very dense landscape, and then when we got there, it was totally abandoned and everything had been cleared. There was nothing left. I was struck by this ghost forest, and started thinking about memory and history, and how the environment changes over time, and how we can create a shrine to what once was. So I had this idea of a ghost forest with this translucent, kind of liminal, sheer material. It was the perfect union.
Chang Yuchen
When you’re in it, you can really feel something spectral. I also always think of my dad. Maybe because we’re very Asian, we keep thinking about our parents. [laughs] ♦