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Creation/Research Support
ClotCloth — A Biomaterial-based Water-resistant Textile Project

With the rise of outdoor activities and techwear in fashion, there has been a surge in the market of technical textiles. However, this category is full of non-biodegradable petrochemical plastics as the textiles’ fibre, treatment or both.

The use of fluorocarbons also generates various harmful substances. To mitigate or to solve these issues, corresponding solutions are being proposed from fields like material futures, sustainable materials, textile research and development from time to time. Yet, most of the products appear to be questionable once being inspected more thoroughly, either still containing petrochemicals or having inadequate durability for practical use.

This project started as the anticipation for a corresponding solution. A viable connection was ultimately discovered among the gathered information across fields, and that is ClotCloth, a biomaterial-based solution that can be done right in a craft studio, and as a water-resistant textile, the final product is expected to have reasonable durability and can degrade naturally without leaving harmful residues. This project revolves around the realisation of ClotCloth and its associated experiments including technical hybrids with other personal approaches. ClotCloth is going to be a new choice for technical textiles.

Apart from technical results, a new material will bring a new materiality, new applications, new approaches, and new aesthetics. This project is also an enactment of its creator’s vision of pushing our world toward a better direction via the potentiality within a new technical object; its pursuit is realisably futuristic. In the exhibition, a sense of encountering a strange civilisation will be made by arraying associated technical results that are unprecedented together, loosening viewers’ pre-existed perceptions of a culture with the alternative, and introducing different perspectives and imaginations. Practices such as achieving technical innovation in a relatively low-tech, craft-based environment and treating materials and techniques as creative subjects both reflect a different perspective on technology and progress.

CREATORS

Jim Chen-Hsiang HU

Jim Chen-Hsiang HU is an alumnus of Central Saint Martins’ Fashion Design Womenswear course. He aspires to renaissance men whose interests get to grow and develop freely and has always been a dissident in many senses. He works in between fashion, craft, tectonic objects, approach invention, and drawing. Subjectively to him, fields other than drawing are often encapsulated as a whole as “designing and making physical objects,” which often carries his wish to make the world a better place. Take approach invention as an example. It started as somewhat of a puzzle game roughly a decade ago, and since then, its scope has extended from a means of expression and aesthetics of instrumental rationality to the potentiality within a new technical object. HU wants to bring metabolism to our culture. As the arrival of the new indicates every tradition and norm was once new, the established approaches and values are not as correct as we may think either. His XI series incorporates 3D weaving, which was an approach invented by him single-handedly. Technically, 3D weaving was inspired by mechanical determinism. Later, how its appearance blurs the boundary of inside and outside triggered thoughts about differences in between things, and the final outcome of XI embodies a dreamy visual sensation that can only be achieved by intricately arranged structures as such. It was reported by i-D, Dezeen, FRAME, Vice, etc., and has been shown across London Design Week, Dutch Design Week, Milan Design Week, and architectural events like UABBHK.

The guiding star in HU’s night sky is approach invention, while drawing shows the barren ground he walks upon. As it is about existential crises, it probes the limitation of being a human, an individual’s sentiments, frustrations, struggles, isolation, and fragility. His drawings are listed in Booooooom’s art book Tomorrow’s Talent Vol. III, and has been chosen as the cover art.

The project ClotCloth being conducted in C-LAB is expected to deliver the most important result among HU’s personal history of technology development since 3D weaving.