Textiles & Entrpreneurship

This is an unfinished story connecting my family to its own history in textiles – stories of importation and entrepreneurship, where my story grafts onto In Conversation and onto this province.

My grandfather, who lived in Hong Kong for the latter 20 years of his life, owned a textile trading company. When he passed away suddenly, my mother — in her early twenties at the time — took over the operations of the company for a short transition period. My aunt and uncle, who moved to the United States in early adulthood, own and run a similar textile business out of California; it has been in operation for several decades.

My relationship to textiles is one of art, but also one of entrepreneurship. My art practice is a business — there is no real way around it. Although my story is different than the family stories that came before me, it requires the same tenacity and work of running a business. These are family values that were passed down to me.

The maker is unknown, as is the case with many of our household items. This simple object, perhaps a bit common place in a lot of senses, holds a complex history as an object and I continue to examine at my relationship to it: its Western aesthetic, its value in beauty and function, its value as craft, the humans behind its production.