CHAT Names Eight Finalists for Its 2027 Textile Art Prize
CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) has revealed the eight artists shortlisted for the second Contemporary Textile Art Prize, chosen from 28 nominations spanning West, Central, South, Southeast and East Asia. Their work will fill the Hong Kong centre from March to June 2027, with the Grand Prize of HK$300,000 announced at The Mills that March, and a further Audience Prize decided by public vote once the exhibition closes.
Gulnur Mukazhanova, Bosağa – Transition. The Weave of Ancestral Memory. BARSAKELMES exhibition. Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, September 2025. Photo: Saparlas.
The range of ideas at play is what makes this shortlist worth paying attention to. Felt appears as a body rather than a fabric. Embroidery becomes a way of arguing with time. A patchwork gets built from the recordings of a "plant orchestra." These are working methods, the actual starting points for eight practices that treat textile as a tool for thinking rather than simply making.
T. Vinoja, Mullivaikkal 2, Courtesy the artist and Experimenter
Untitled (Fort Road Beach), 2023. Mixed media Approx 99.5x36x36 inches. Photo credit: Paul Salveson
It is fitting that this prize runs out of CHAT, a centre housed in the former Nan Fung Textile Mills in Tsuen Wan, a cotton-spinning factory that closed in 2008 as Hong Kong's textile industry declined. Since opening in 2019, CHAT has become Hong Kong's only art institution dedicated to textile heritage, running workshops taught by former mill workers alongside its exhibitions. This prize extends that instinct: taking a material bound up with labour and history and asking what it can still say about the present.
Portrait of Aoki Ryoko and Ito Zon. Photo credit: Takeru Koroda. Courtesy of the artist.
What stands out is how differently each artist puts textile to work. Majd Abdel Hamid, moving between Beirut and Paris, treats embroidery as a deliberately slow gesture, a rebuttal to the pace of the world around him. In Kyoto, the duo Aoki Ryoko and Ito Zon dismantle old materials and reassemble them into patchwork, tracing conservation histories back to their origins.
"Dreamscapes", Gidree Bawlee. Image courtesy of the artists.
Community runs through several practices rather than sitting on their surface. Gidree Bawlee, a collective based in rural northern Bangladesh, treats textile and fibre as living processes bound up with land, water and shared memory. Mella Jaarsma, who has lived in Indonesia for four decades, works with wearables and barkcloth to examine how colonial histories reshape meaning over generations.
Mella Jaarsma, Trouble Skirts, 2023. One of 24 costumes. Photography: Mie Cornoedus. Courtesy of the artist
For Gulnur Mukazhanova, felt carries the archetypal weight of nomadic Kazakh culture, transformed into something spatial and performative. T. Vinoja, working from Kilinochchi, uses tearing, fading and stitching to hold the memory of the Sri Lankan civil war. Lee Kang Seung draws on queer archives, intertwining drawing, text and embroidery to reposition histories often left out of the record. And Wang Yuyu turns to adhesion, parasitism and infiltration, non-human survival strategies, to explore how bodies and matter behave in shared urban space.
Haustorium Leaching, Wang Yuyu / Studio Gallery
CHAT's panel, drawing curators from institutions including the Samdani Art Foundation, National Gallery Singapore and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, judged the field on artistic potential, originality, skill, idea and methodology. The result is a shortlist that moves between migration, ecology, queer history and collective memory, handled with real technical precision, and confirms textile's place at the centre of contemporary art rather than its edges.
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Further Information:
Work from the finalists of the second Contemporary Textile Art Prize will be on show from March to June 2027, at the Hong Kong centre.
CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile)
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Image Credits:
Lead: Majd Abdel Hamid, Second Resonance, 2025, Photo: E Sommer for Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen.
All further images as credited in captions.