SHORT DESCRIPTION

Weaving the Unwritten is a long-term research and curatorial project investigating the lives, labour, and cultural traces of women textile workers in South Korea, particularly those from Anyang’s spinning factories between the 1950s and 1980s. Through archival research, fieldwork, and transregional dialogue, the project reconsiders how women’s industrial labour shaped social memory, collective identity, and contemporary feminist imaginaries.

The project examines how women’s labour was mobilised, disciplined, and often erased within national industrialisation, regional economies, shifting technologies, and conservative social structures. Drawing from archival documents, personal records, photographs, and on-site materials, it situates the histories of Korean textile workers in dialogue with parallel experiences in Hong Kong and other East Asian contexts.

Beyond documenting industrial history, Weaving the Unwritten asks how emotions, relations, and memories formed through labour continue to resonate today. It explores how artistic and curatorial practices might rearticulate these lived histories and activate shared forms of remembrance, narrative-making, and feminist solidarity.

The methodology combines fieldwork, archival analysis, interviews, and collective formats, expanding into workshops, roundtables, exhibitions, and publications.

COLLABORATIONS

⁃ Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR), Berlin
⁃ Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile (CHAT), Hong Kong

▾ Weaving Sisters: Zine Workshop

Collective zine-making workshop

Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt (Germany)
22 November 2025

Facilitated by Park Hye-in & Sakhile Matlhare

Developed as part of Weaving the Unwritten, Weaving Sisters translated the project’s research on women’s labour histories into a collective publishing format. The workshop brought together storytelling, image-making, and feminist knowledge exchange through collaborative zine design.

Participants worked with drawing, writing, collage, and simple sewing techniques to create a shared publication reflecting personal and collective narratives of work, care, love, and self-determination. The title references weaving traditions in folktales and mythologies, where weaving symbolises skill, resilience, and the crafting of one’s own destiny.

Over the course of three hours, the workshop fostered intergenerational dialogue, shared responsibility, and collective authorship. Each participant received a copy of the collaboratively produced zine.

▾ Women-Led Communities

Roundtable discussion

PalaisPopulaire, Berlin (Germany)
10 November 2025

Speakers: Charmaine Poh, Mooni Perry, Christina Yuna Ko, Park Hye-in (AFSAR)
Part of Lawrence Lek’s solo exhibition NOX

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Organised as part of the public programme for Charmaine Poh’s exhibition Make a Travel Deep of Your Inside, and Don’t Forget Me to Take, this roundtable brought together members of AFSAR—Charmaine Poh, Christina Yuna Ko, Park Hye-in, and Mooni Perry—to reflect on research and artistic practices centred on women-led communities across East and Southeast Asia.

The discussion addressed intersections between women’s labour histories, feminist and collaborative forms of organisation, diasporic narratives, and ritual and spiritual practices embedded in everyday life. A storytelling script was collaboratively developed through email correspondence among the four participants, foregrounding AFSAR’s commitment to distributed authorship and collective knowledge-making.

Moderated by cultural critic and Missy Magazine co-founder Sonja Eismann, the session created a space for dialogue on transnational feminist networks and community-based care practices. The event was livestreamed and is archived on the Palais Populaire YouTube channel.

▾ Exploring Zhinu Culture, Daoism, and the Textile Heritage of Hong Kong

Fieldwork · Interviews · Archival Research In collaboration with Mooni Perry

Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile (CHAT), Hong Kong
July 2025

In July 2025, as part of Mooni Perry’s programme at CHAT, Park Hye-in undertook a month-long research residency examining the histories of female textile workers and industrial communities in Hong Kong from the mid-twentieth century onward.

The research combined fieldwork across former mill districts, interviews, archival materials, and site-based observation. It traced labour conditions, factory dormitories, night-school education, and the everyday routines that structured women’s working lives, situating these histories within broader regional economies, migration patterns, and gendered divisions of labour in post-war East Asia.

The residency concluded with a closed-door research presentation at Asia Art Archive (AAA), where preliminary mappings, oral-history insights, and visual materials were shared with invited researchers and practitioners.