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When he was alive, the graffiti of Tsang Tsou-choi, or the “King of Kowloon,” was considered peculiar and personal. In a radically changed city, his mostly vanished art now has a political charge.HONG KONG — Often shirtless in summer, smelling of sweat and ink, the aggrieved artist wrote incessantly, and everywhere: on walls, underpasses, lamp posts and traffic light control boxes.He covered public spaces in Hong Kong with expansive jumbles of Chinese characters that announced his unshakable belief that much of the Kowloon Peninsula rightfully belonged to his family.During his lifetime, the graffiti artist, Tsang Tsou-choi, was a ubiquitous figure, well-known for his eccentric campaign that struck most as a peculiar personal mission, not a political rallying cry.But Hong Kong has become a very different place since Mr. Tsang died in 2007, and his work — once commonly spotted, but now largely vanished from the streetscape — has taken on a new resonance in a city where much political expression has been stamped out by a sweeping campaign against dissent since 2020.“In his lifetime, particularly early on, people thought he was completely crazy,” said Louisa Lim, author of “Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong,” a new book that examines Mr. Tsang’s legacy. “Even at the time that he died no one was really interested in the content or the political message of his work. But actually, he was talking about these Hong Kong preoccupations long before other people were — territory, sovereignty, dispossession and loss.”When a decades-old work surfaced earlier this year, it started drawing a crowd to a setting that could hardly be more mundane: a concrete railway bridge, built over a roadway and adorned with little besides a registration number and a warning against graffiti.The bridge sits near a bird market and a sports stadium on Boundary Street, a road that marks the edge of the territory ceded by the Qing dynasty to the British in 1860 after the Second Opium War. It is covered in gray paint, some of which flaked away this spring — exactly how remains a mystery — to reveal a palimpsest of Mr. Tsang’s work from several eras of painting at one of his favorite sites.Taking a photo of the newly discovered work. “There are very few King of Kowloon works left in Hong Kong, and now, those that are before our eyes are precious,” When In Doubt, an artist collective, wrote in celebration of the discovery. Anthony Kwan for The New York TimesLam Siu-wing, a Hong Kong artist, said he happened across the Boundary Street work while out for an evening walk in late March.“I thought the old Hong Kong was saying hello again,” he said.News of the discovery began to spread, with When In Doubt, an artist collective that Mr. Lam belongs to, describing his find as a rare treasure. The group noted that it’s one of the earliest artistic creations to prod discussion of an essential and increasingly pressing question in Hong Kong: Who does urban space belong to?The Latest on China: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 6China’s economy stumbles. More
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#Rebecca Louise LawNovember 5, 2022
Kate Mothes More
“Replica of a Chip” (1994), wool mounted on wood, 120 × 146.1 centimeters. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA. Image courtesy of American Indian Science and Engineering Society, shared with permission
Marilou Schultz Weaves Computer Processor Patterns in Traditional Navajo Tapestries
November 14, 2024
ArtCraftDesignHistory
Kate Mothes
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What does Intel’s Pentium computer chip have in common with Navajo textiles? More than you might think.
For artist Marilou Schultz, the ancestral practice of weaving melds with an unexpected contemporary source of inspiration. Merging analog loom methods with the patterns found on computer processor cores, Schultz entwines the histories of the Navajo people and modern technology.
Detail of Intel Pentium core processor die
In the late 17th century, Spanish colonists introduced a breed of sheep called the Iberian Churro to the American Southwest. The Diné—known also as Navajo—who had lived in the Four Corners region for hundreds of years, embraced shepherding and wool production, eventually developing a unique breed still managed today, the Navajo-Churro.
Along with an aptitude for raising sheep, Diné weaving traditions flourished. Anthropologists surmise that the craft was adopted from the neighboring Puebloans sometime in the 12th or 13th centuries. As time passed, Navajo styles and techniques evolved, rising to popularity first among Plains Indian tribes and then, in the 19th century, with Europeans and non-Native tourists who sought out blankets and rugs for their remarkable craftsmanship and geometric patterns.
Schultz, a mathematician and teacher in addition to her studio practice, was commissioned by Intel in 1994 to make “Replica of a Chip” as a gift to the American Indian Science & Engineering Society, an organization still active today that focuses on advancing Indigenous people in STEM. As computer historian Ken Schirriff details in a thorough blog post about the piece—especially its highly accurate layout—the work highlights the alluring patterns of a trailblazing piece of technology.
Detail of “Replica of a Chip”
The first Pentium processor was released in 1993. About the size of a fingernail, the die—the material on which the processor is fabricated—contains more than three million transistors. These microscopic switches control the flow of electricity to process data. Today, some high-powered chips contain billions of transistors.
Schultz faithfully transferred the die pattern to a tapestry, employing delicate loom techniques and working from a photograph of the chip. Unlike traditional Navajo textiles, the geometries in “Replica of a Chip” are far from symmetrical.
She used yarn pigmented with plant dyes, and the cream-colored regions are the natural shade of Navajo-Churro wool. Schultz told Schirriff that the weaving process was slow and deliberate as she referenced the image, completing about one to one-and-a-half inches per day. The painstaking and methodical process of sending warp through weft creates a beautiful tension between the instantaneous results we associate with digital tools today.
Intel Pentium processors
“Replica of a Chip” was the first in a series of weavings Schultz created based on computer circuits, including one known as the Fairchild 9040. While not as common as the Pentium, the Fairchild company is notable for its employment of Navajo workers in its operation in Shiprock, New Mexico—within the Navajo Nation—in the 1960s and 1970s.
Part of a government initiative to try to improve the economic conditions of life on the reservation, Fairchild was incentivized to open a manufacturing center in Shiprock. “The project started in 1965 with 50 Navajo workers in the Shiprock Community Center manufacturing transistors, rapidly increasing to 366 Navajo workers,” Schirriff says. Eventually, the company “employed 1,200 workers, and all but 24 were Navajo, making Fairchild the nation’s largest non-government employer of American Indians.”
In 1975, the Fairchild-Navajo partnership took a dramatic turn that spelled its demise. With the semiconductor industry suffering from the crippling U.S. recession at the time, Fairchild laid off 140 Navajo employees in Shiprock, which today still has a population of only a little more than 8,000 residents. The layoffs were a blow to the community. A group of 20 locals, armed with rifles, responded by occupying the plant for a week.
While the episode eventually ended peaceably, Fairchild decided to shutter entirely and move its operation overseas, further compromising trust in corporate interests on Navajo land.
Women’s roles in manufacturing and assembling electronics are often under-recognized. Schultz taps into ideas around gendered labor, visibility, and the slippery notion of “progress.” Through the lens of Navajo history and craft, she addresses paradigm shifts in technology, economics, and social change through the language of fiber.
You can see “Replica of a Chip” in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, which continues through March 2, 2025.
Detail of “”Replica of a Chip”
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