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Creation/Research Support
Seven people crossing the sea

This project is a work of video art inspired by the life story of HO Ying, a stall owner in the Pang Jai Fabric Bazaar, Hong Kong, and the anti-relocation movement he started. HO is invited to join the cast of this video that features his story. Through the self-organization and management of the stall owners who moved to this place since 1978, it has evolved organically into a systematic fabric market. Since the 1960s, Hong Kong has been the relay station for occidental countries to expand their global garment industry chains. Taking advantage of their language proficiency and Hong Kong’s geographical location, many Hong Kong businessmen began to set up textile factories and garment processing factories in Asian countries, in order to harness the relatively cheap labor there. They tended to outsource and subcontract the orders from occidental countries. In the Pang Jai fabric bazaar, the cloth sold by the vendors, commonly known as “stock cloth,” usually came from the cloth scrap left by Hong Kong-funded manufacturers. Different types of cloth were piled up, encapsulating the 40-year vicissitudes of the garment industry in Hong Kong and Asia. As a native of Foshan, Guangdong Province, HO Ying sneaked into Hong Kong by swimming across the sea with his six friends when he was young. He is one of the few remaining stall owners in the bazaar as well as the initiator of the anti-relocation movement. Forced to be relocated by the Hong Kong government, the Pang Jai Fabric Bazaar has stimulated the reflection on the vendors’ legality/legitimacy and the exploration of the grassroots living space. Initiated by HO Ying and organized by the remaining cloth vendors, the Pang Jai Concern Group collaborates with students, teachers, social activists, journalists, designers and artists, striving to contemplate and discover the bazaar’s historical, cultural and contemporary significance beyond its preservation and demolition, insofar as to offer it added value and diverse possibilities.

CREATORS

HUANG Po-Chih

Po-Chih Huang’s diverse artistic practice revolves around the circumstances and history of his family which enable him to involve in issues like agriculture, manufacturing, production, consumption, etc. Since 2013, exhibitions of his continuous art project Five Hundred Lemon Trees have been transformed to a crowd funding platform allowing the appropriation of artistic resources for developing an agricultural brand, activating fallow farmland, and growing lemon trees for lemon liquor. On the other hand, the project has connected his family members, local farmers and consumers to make a new social relationship possible. In the same year, he published his first collection of essays Blue Skin–All About My Mother《藍色皮膚:老媽的故事》, the story about his mother. In a way, such a brief account of personal history can somehow reflect Taiwan's agriculture economic reform and social change over the past fifty years, which is essentially, a micro-level of observing his own family history and society as a whole in Taiwan.