Hsu Chiu-i (徐秋宜) studied to be a painter and sculptor, but now she applies the fine art techniques she learned to her one-of-a-kind clothing designs, many of which are dyed with natural indigo pigment. During a press conference for the Taipei Fabricreative Project (台北布思議) at Taipei City Hall on Friday last week, Hsu demonstrated how to turn a few yards of fabric into a sundress or a flowing Grecian goddess evening gown without sewing by using deftly executed twists, tucks and pleats.
“Working with fabric is just like sculpting,” said Hsu in an interview after the event. “It’s about manipulating space.”
Hsu’s eponymous clothing label is sold at her store Artale Workshop near Zhongshan MRT Station (中山捷運站). The space also carries items from other Taiwanese brands, including hand-painted ceramics and glass pendants by Art Lee, sterling silver accessories by Bomb Metal and Fry Jewelry (爆炸毛頭與油炸朱利), fikabrod’s felted toys and T-shirts by minono.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
Most of Hsu’s current creations are dyed with indigo pigment made from the leaves of the Assam indigo plant (馬藍, botanical name strobilanthes cusia). Her textile designs range from intricately detailed flowers to bold ombre washes.
“People link indigo dyeing with traditional clothing, but I like to experiment with ways to make it feel contemporary,” says Hsu.
In Taiwan, indigo-dyed fabrics are associated with simple shirts once worn by the Hakka, who favored the deep blue color for work clothes because it hid stains well. Sansia District (三峽區) in New Taipei City was once the center of indigo dyeing in Taiwan, but production began to decline in the early 20th century as chemical dyes became available.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
Hsu hopes to revive the industry by selling enough indigo-
dyed clothing and accessories to start passing orders on to
fabric workshops.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
Though Hsu’s clothing label, which was founded in 1996, is now best known for her indigo-dyed pieces, she did not begin working with the natural pigment until just two and a half years ago, while serving as a consultant for textile and accessory manufacturers.
“They had used indigo dyeing for little things like scarves and bags before, but they wanted me to show them how they could incorporate it into larger items like clothing,” says Hsu. “I found it fascinating.”
Traditional dyeing techniques include wax-resist, in which a pattern is first applied to the fabric using wax, or shibori, a form of tie-dyeing that originated in Japan and produces intricate patterns. Hsu, however, prefers to create larger, more dynamic designs.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
“The color of indigo dyes reminds me of the clouds in Chinese paintings. I wanted to capture that sense of freedom and movement,” says Hsu. “Some of my patterns have been based on paintings by my husband [artist Wang Ren-jye (王仁傑)] and daughter, or even dogs I see while out walking.”
Though her mother was a custom dressmaker, Hsu never thought she would follow in her parent’s footsteps and went to art school to study Western painting and sculpture instead.
“I always preferred drawing. I would cut out paper dolls from my mother’s fashion magazines, but I never imagined I would enter this business,” says Hsu.
Photo: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
After graduating from art school, however, Hsu landed a position as a textile designer, creating patterns for intarsia fabric. During the early 1990s, Hsu earned a master’s degree in fashion design at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. After a stint as a trends analyst for the Taiwan Textile Federation (紡拓會設計中心), Hsu launched her namesake fashion label in 1996.
Hsu dyes all her textiles at her home studio near Artale Workshop, working with fabric pieces that measure 2m or 3m each. In order to create gradations in color from the palest shade of slate to deep midnight blue, Hsu dips the cloth into the indigo dye bath several times, laying it out to dry in the sun between each immersion and repeating the process until she achieves the color she wants. Most fabric takes about three days to finish, Hsu says.
Her dresses, skirts and shirts are made to preserve and show off the painstakingly created indigo patterns.
“If you use ordinary dressmaking patterns, you cut up the design,” says Hsu. “But I also didn’t want to make dresses that just use one large piece of fabric in the front and then another in the back, so I began to experiment with draping the fabric in different ways.”
Hsu hopes to find ways to lower the production costs of indigo dyeing and encourage more designers and textile artists to work with the technique.
“Indigo is very special to me. We can preserve a traditional textile art but at the same time we also have an opportunity to modernize it, and it’s all done with environmentally friendly materials,” says Hsu. “Hopefully we can turn indigo dyeing into a viable industry again.”
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
Taiwan’s drone exports are taking off, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, as Taiwanese companies seek a stake in the fast-growing global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Low-cost drones used for reconnaissance and strikes are in high demand as governments around the world boost defense spending in the face of intensifying conflicts. A relative new player in the increasingly competitive industry, Taiwan’s pitch is to be an “Asian hub” for the production of UAVs and components free of Chinese materials, or “non-red.” That means its UAVs can be up to three times more expensive than their Chinese competitors, like the world’s biggest
RSS