Busy Needles: CHAT Explores Hong Kong’s Maximalist Textiles

Hong Kong’s story tends to be told in broad strokes: a spectacular rise from fishing village to industrial hub, then ascendance to financial powerhouse. In the tale of this Asian Tiger there are several protagonists, but the human touch and societal fabric that contributed to Hong Kong’s evolution is overlooked. That’s especially true for the crafts that defined so much of Hong Kong’s economic wonder — sitting somewhere between art and industry, they were practised by dexterous women whose role deserves more exploration. 

That’s why curator Bruce Li has assembled the exhibition Busy Needles: Textile Embellishments of Hong Kong. Through this lens, he examines the ways in which small scale cottage industries helped shape Hong Kong as a global textiles manufacturing hub. “Beading, embroidery and drawnwork are vehicles for me to understand the unique characteristics of craft production in Hong Kong,” says Li as he guides us through his display at CHAT, the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile. “Unlike the great factories like Nan Fung” — the mill whose space CHAT now occupies — “the spaces and producers behind industrial textiles embellishment are unseen. Their history is quite undiscovered because it happened behind closed doors. I really wanted them to make an appearance.”

Photographed in various scenes of industry, women are seen huddled over delicate needlework. Seated on low stools or on metal framed bunks, they are sometimes accompanied by friends and daughters, busy fingers working fabric in the modest surroundings of public housing estates. “Women typically would go to a collection point to get the materials they needed for the day,” Li explains. “They’d bring it home to do it. And sometimes the work trickled down to the daughters.”

The exact scope of this industry remains shrouded in mystery: since much of the work was informal, Li found it difficult to find precise information. “There were no real statistics and I didn’t get to know a lot about the exact [size or makeup of] the labour force,” he says. A lot is very vague. He gives an example: “There is a report from 1954 that officially recorded 33 embroidery establishments. But this only reports the centres for coordinating labour. It’s not a reflection of how many people were involved. There’s no way to really know. It’s difficult to really understand the scale.”

Industry at home

What’s clear is that Hong Kong’s garment and textiles industry exploded in the years after World War II. The late 1940s saw a vast influx of immigrants, refugees, money and industrial know-how from mainland China to Hong Kong. Boasting robust financial, communication and transportation infrastructure, Hong Kong was well-placed to support a lively manufacturing sector and stood out from many other parts of Asia, which were slow to develop such systems.

While some manufacturing outfits would grow into the one-stop shops that we tend to associate with the word “factory,” many were supported by cottage industries operated by individuals or families out of homes rather than purpose-built facilities. This was especially true for embellishment and embroidery, which were performed in particular by migrants from Swatow — today officially known by its Mandarin name, Shantou — in eastern Guangdong.

The roots of this craft trace back to missionaries like Sophia Norwood Lyall of the English Presbyterian Mission and Lida Scott Ashmore of the American Baptist Church, who introduced the delicate textile craft known as drawnwork to Swatow in the late 19th century. As the people of Swatow mastered the craft, their fine handiwork would come to be known as “Swatow lace.” What began with missionaries teaching crafts to orphans and villagers as a way to spread faith transformed into something bigger when it became clear how skillful they were. Swatow lace became a commercial product and eventually it developed into an international industry. 

From Swatow to Hong Kong and back

Many delicate examples of drawnwork are displayed at CHAT. As light as gossamer, drawnwork involves carefully cutting cloth and then drawing thread out to create a perforated pattern in negative space. “You would go in with a needle and thread after to tie it all back together so it wouldn’t fray,” says Li. “On top, you could do intricate embroidery.”

In even the plainest examples, white flowers bloom from diaphanous fabric, but these are accompanied by more vibrant samples embellished with roiling dragons and other fanciful fauna. The products found their way into Western homes as coasters and swaddling for bread. This would have been laughable to the drawnwork embroiderers of Swatow in their squalid lodgings. To the makers, drawnwork products were not only ludicrous but also inauspicious in their use of negative space and the colour white, which has funereal associations in traditional Chinese culture. 

In the mid 1950s, production returned to China from Hong Kong, with state-run factories coming back online and Hong Kong becoming more of a centre for the export trade. The people of Swatow continued to develop the craft, making it their own by adding dazzling colour and raised textures along with Chinese motifs and exotic symbolism which consumers in the west snapped up enthusiastically. In this way dragons, phoenixes and peonies were incorporated into what Li calls “a very mishmash kind of aesthetic divorced of the original missionary context.”

Installation view, ‘Busy Needles’ at CHAT – Photo courtesy CHAT

Religious workshops

Drawnwork was not the only craft introduced to Hong Kong via religion; in 2020, the history of another was dramatically revealed. A structural inspection of the Maryknoll Convent at Boundary Street uncovered a hidden attic containing over 400 paper embroidery patterns, haberdashery, over 3,000 purchase orders and a wide assortment of houseware revealing the unique and long-forgotten history of the embroidery and sewing workshop set up by the Maryknoll Sisters. “Stored away in trunks, they had been forgotten because at some point they’d built a false ceiling that covered the attic door,” says Li. Remarkably, the materials remained in fairly good condition.

The Maryknoll Sisters are an institute of Catholic religious sisters founded in the village of Ossining, Westchester County, New York, in 1912. The sisters established their embroidery and sewing workshop in 1924, one year before founding Maryknoll Convent School. They hired up to 90 local women to produce vestments, altar cloths and other religious textiles for missionary bodies in Hong Kong and abroad, until they wound down operations in 1970. 

Operating a mail order business, they generated income for the convent and allowed the sisters, through each embroidered motif and the meaning it carried, to advance their mission with their employees, many of whom they converted to Christianity. The records left behind revealed the scale of Hong Kong’s craft production: thousands of purchase orders, receipts and other documents that revealed they had sold their textiles to more than 60 countries. That means the goods on display in Busy Needles are reproductions. “We made these replicas because the real things had been exported,” explains Li. The designs now only exist on wax paper. Perforated with tiny holes, designs would be brushed with chalk powder that would transfer patterns onto the fabric underneath. 

Maryknoll’s workshop would not stick solely to these traditional styles for long. One mail order pamphlet published in 1954 quotes Pope Pius XII calling for modern art to “join its voice to [the] wonderful choir of praise.” The response was a shift away from figurative and ornate motifs of grapes and vines and towards emphatically geometric ornamentation. “They wanted to be more progressive, or be seen as more progressive,” says Li. This mentality trickled down to textile design. One design by Sister Francis Venard Lotito references abstract painting and modern art. “There’s a style called Mondrian,” says Li, referring to the Dutch painter whose simplified geometric forms marked him out as one of the most important pioneers of 20th century abstract art. “It all becomes very minimal.”

Maximalist tendencies

Contrasted against these minimalist vestments is the maximalist knitwear shown alongside. The oldest of these are from the 1950s and they feature symmetrical designs picked out in galaxies of tiny glinting beads. “Later on they become more fun, organic and asymmetrical,” says Li with a smile. “Eventually they were beading over everything: cigarette cases, wallets — you’ll see some shoes later.”

When Li says that the Hong Kong garment trade beaded everything, he means it. Displayed along the other bedazzled items is a curiously modish paradox of tradition and trend — a sequined kwan kwa (裙褂 kwan4 gwaa3), or southern Chinese wedding dress — from the Lucky Embroidery bridal shop. “This kwun kwa is very unconventional,” says Li. “The traditional kwan kwa is, of course, fully embroidered with metallic thread. Rarely would you have seen beads and sequins on them but from the late 60s through the 80s, the beaded kwun kua became quite a popular alternative because of various reasons including affordability and surplus materials and labour from the booming garment and plastic industries. Many traditional embroidery houses at the time thought, ‘Why not try to incorporate these techniques and materials into the traditional form?’”

To create these beaded beauties, Hong Kong’s garment industry once again relied on casual labour and cottage industries. Clara Chung, who worked part-time as a tutor when she was a high school student in the 1960s, was one such beader. “In the summer holidays I didn’t have students, so instead I would take on beading work,” she says. “You would pick up the materials from the central distribution point in Wan Chai and complete the work at home. With that money I made clothes to go out dancing!” Chung still has beaded garments of her own from the 1970s. Shimmering like obsidian disco balls, these outfits speak to the glamour of those fast times.  

The exhibition includes a number of items from the same era, including an orange purse made of beads and string alone, with no fabric substrate. “A bit like taxi drivers’ seat beads!” exclaims Li. Completing the ensemble are a number of beaded dresses collected by the businesswoman Lee Gui Zhen, often known as Madame Lee, who founded a beading factory in the late 1950s. Though she started by making classic patterns, “around the 70s she began playing around with her own designs, which was rare for people at the time,” says Li. Madame Lee’s child-like beaded graphics have a bold outsider charm that Western customers loved. In 1997, luxury brand Dior commissioned Lee to make one of her naïve designs for a dress. The garment is proudly displayed at CHAT.

Today, “made in Hong Kong” stands for quality rather than mass production. With the city’s manufacturing glory days in the past, Hong Kong’s busy needles may have slowed, but the city that once clothed the world has been transformed into a centre of style. With the fast pace of trends it’s easy to forget the quiet cultivated awareness of what came before — taste. 

“I want people to think about this very different kind of aesthetic,” says Li. “The world that people enjoyed at that time, it can seem very frivolous today. We tend towards minimalism now, but in that era they had a different appreciation. That sensibility is reflected in the time and labor that was captured in this embellishment. “It shows in this work that is so very bling bling.”

Busy Needles runs at CHAT until February 22, 2026. Click here for more information.