Hundred Quilts: No Knots Without Weight
River Art Gallery
Taichung, Taiwan
Group Show
Hundred Quilts: No Knots Without Weight, featuring six artists whose practices span paper, fabric, painting, sculpture, and installation. The exhibition brings together Japanese-Canadian artist Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka; Mexican artist Allan Villavicencio; Taiwanese-Australian artist Angie Pai; Taiwanese-Canadian artist Dennis Lin; Chinese artist Amy Hui Li, and Korean artist Lili Lee. Taking the “patchwork quilt” as its central metaphor, the exhibition examines its cultural formation, material structure, and corporeal labor embedded within. It traces how textile and fiber practices, shaped by scarcity, rupture, care, and migration, gradually form a structure capable of sustaining life, through which fiber regains a renewed perceptual and symbolic weight in the present.
“Hundred Quilts” refers not only to patchwork as a form, but also to a structural condition repeatedly stitched together through history. From the Hundred-Family Quilt (baijia quilt) in Northern Chinese culture, to Buddhist monastic robes (kasaya), Japanese boro textiles and sashiko stitching traditions, and the Rajah Quilt embedded in Australia’s colonial history, fiber has long functioned as a material vessel of memory, identity, and the traces of labor. Providing shelter and protection, these textile structures are assembled from fragments—each individual piece bearing the sediment of time and the imprint of the body.