Thank you to Professor Soo Kim , Program Director of Photography and head of the Critic-in-Residence program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles for coordinating this special talk for LA Textile Month.
Artists iris yirei hu (Los Angeles) and Shih Wei Chieh 施 惟 捷 (Taipei) will share how their process-driven creative and collaborative practices uplift surprise, rigorous play, and serendipitous encounters. Shih and hu met on the online platform Having Friends in the Future, founded by Shih, which aimed to create an international craft and e-textile commons, materials library, and swatchbook during the pandemic. Their work expands upon the definition of craft towards a more inclusive one that reaches into racial and environmental justice, citizen science, DIY technology, hactivism, and open source communities. They are interested in notions of "connection" and "commons" in embodied, experimental, and expansive ways, and hope to explore possibilities of "crafting life" in an open discussion with participants.
This is an online talk. Link below and paste in this meeting number: 486 644 6744
Re: generative kit (for John) | Arm Gallery & Visitor Welcome Center, 2021
STATEMENT - for the entire statement, please visit her website:
I work with my hands to weave, tell stories, transform, dye, and compost my lived reality. Painting, weaving, natural indigo dyeing, collecting earthly specimens, and working with soil and fibers are ways to redeem the embodied intimacy we once had with the natural world. I make colorful, haptic, and large assemblages, which are a culmination of networks that reverberate through time and space in both tangible and cosmic ways. In a single assemblage, one may encounter materials, stories, living organisms, and ecologies from Taiwan, California, Southern China, Mexico, and the American Southwest. As someone who is interested in how people, places, and plants are interconnected through colonialism, my work allows me to form connections with artists, scientists, historians, keepers of traditions, and community stakeholders and organizers. I center learning in these relationships and through them, hope to collaboratively shape futures and friendships.
ABOUT IRIS YIREI HU
She earned her BA from UCLA and MFA from Columbia University in the City of New York.
Iris Yirei Hu (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who works in painting, fibers, text, and installation. She is interested in how people, places, and things are related, and sees art practices as a manifestation of entangled interdependencies. Her work centers learning as a method of engagement, and is both research based and dependent on lived experience.
Professional Accomplishments/Exhibitions:
Iris has shown her work at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Oxy Arts at Occidental College, John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Women's Center for Creative Work, Human Resources, Lenfest Center for the Arts (New York, NY), and Visitor Welcome Center. Her work has been reviewed and featured in the LA Times, Artforum, Carla, CNN, Sinovision, KCET, and X-TRA Online. She has been supported by the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Engagement Grant, among others. She is the co-founder of the emi kuriyama spirit award, an unrestricted artist and writer grant for those practicing in LA.
ABOUT SHIH WEI CHIEH
(Ed note: I didn’t find a bio-bio on Shih Wei CHieh’s site, so I am pasting the text from just one of her projects. If this intrigues you, I encourage you to link through the read the rest. It’s all so so good.)
Tribe Against Machine is an attempt to link art, hacker culture, material science, and ancient culture. It seeks inspiration for material design in ancient practices. Although this project was originated from the collaboration between technology and tribal culture, we prefer "tribes" "And "machine" mean a broader interpretation of "unhomogenized group" and "system"! The project includes organizing workshops, such as nomadic "camps" in cooperation with international volunteers from all over the world, or material experiment workshops in cooperation with traditional craft communities, using cultural and artistic forms to find translations in different cultural and temporal dimensions. It is wonderful to create a community that “connects the past and the future”; for example, the knowledge of the botany of the Taiwanese tribes has brought inspiration for the design of biological textiles, and the application of conductive fibers has inspired traditional craftsmen. The construction of greenhouses in the developing regions has proposed the possibility of technological art participating in social design projects and so on.