What does it mean for a textile to carry meaning before it is woven?
In Tingting Xiao’s practice, textiles tell a story before they are touched—and in her installations, touch is not an afterthought. Viewers are encouraged to meet the work with their hands as much as their eyes. The encounter is not only visual but physical, grounded in the way fabric holds warmth, pressure, and proximity.
At first glance, Xiao’s works feel almost immaterial. They hover somewhere between delicacy and disappearance. Light passes through them. They look impossibly fragile—like they might collapse under touch—and yet they hold. Silk tightens into structure, cotton spreads and softens the field, hemp quietly anchors everything. What appears delicate is actually held together by a carefully distributed balance, where strength is built through material relation.
That sense of contact begins long before the loom. Xiao gathers her materials through travel and exchange across Asia—silk, cotton, naturally dyed yarns often made in collaboration with rural women’s dyeing practices. By the time these materials reach her studio, they have lived lives shaped by migration and touch. They have passed through different hands, different places, and different economies of making. They carry traces of labour, of geography, and of time spent in transit.
Weaving begins inside this already activated landscape. For Xiao, choosing materials is less about selecting from a palette and more about navigating distance and closeness—what can be found, what is remembered, what can be brought into contact. The more materials she works with, the more relationships emerge from within the weave. Colour, while not entirely incidental, happens through encounter—through how fibres sit together and subtly hold one another.
This focus on process pushes back against a tendency in textile for fabric to be read as though it holds meaning in place—tradition, care, slowness, spirituality—as though these ideas are fixed within the material itself. As a result, textiles are often turned into cultural statements before the work has really been looked at. Meaning is pre determined, guided by familiar ways of interpreting rather than by paying attention to how the piece is actually put together.
This becomes more pronounced when it comes to non-Western or diasporic textile practices. Once the process drops out of view, materials and techniques are easily folded into narratives of heritage or continuity. What gets emphasised is where something is thought to come from, rather than how it is made and continuously remade through material decisions. In that move, textile work can end up being fixed too quickly as proof of origin—where “elsewhere” is made immediately recognisable, before the work itself has had a chance to be properly seen.
Part of what sits behind this is an incomplete view of weaving itself. Rather than understanding it as a process where meaning is built through relationships—between threads, through tension, through sequence—it is treated as something that simply carries expression from one place to another. When that happens, attention shifts away from making and toward interpretation alone, as if the textile is there to be read rather than made.
Against this, Xiao brings the loom back into view, literally installing it into exhibition spaces and weaving in real time, performing the construction of the work in front of audiences. This live weaving recalls traditions of process-based and performative making in which the artwork is reunited with its production. It also alters the status of the textile itself—reducing its distance from the viewer, making the conditions of its formation visible, and lifting the sense of opacity that often surrounds finely crafted fabric. The work becomes less about the finished object as a self-contained surface, and more about the unfolding of how it comes into being.
There is also a difference in how fabric itself is understood across different audiences and their experiences of textile. For instance, Western tailoring often works by shaping fabric around the body—cutting, sculpting, defining the silhouette. But in many East Asian textile traditions, there is a stronger emphasis on drape and continuity, where the fabric’s own behaviour is uninterrupted, embraced, and conserved. Structure is still present, but it is embedded in the weave, in the way cloth falls by itself. How it moves is brought out from within it, rather than imposed through cutting. The textile is allowed to speak in its own logic.
Yet when these differences are discussed today, they are often pulled into overly simple narratives—turned into aesthetic “wisdom” or lifestyle philosophy. Practices become detached from the conditions that shaped them: the labour, the material constraints, the histories of technique and necessity. What was once a way of working with material becomes a story about cultural essence. In that process, something subtle is lost—the specificity of how things are actually made.
Xiao’s work resists that kind of simplification over the course of her process. She starts with materials already in circulation, but not fixed in meaning. Silk, cotton, hemp—all behave differently. Silk catches light and shifts, cotton softens and diffuses, hemp holds tension and structure. These practical behaviours shape how the work forms, allowing meaning to arrive through interaction.
This is especially clear in Conceptual Woven Bag (2024). The work begins with something abstract and transforms into an object that is vaguely recognisable: the outline of a bag, loosely connected to traditional Cheongsam patterning. Instead of cutting and assembling parts, Xiao first weaves a continuous surface which is then folded into shape. The object isn’t sewn or built in the usual sense—it is released from the weave itself.
It sits in a slightly humorous in-between state, technically a “bag,” but one that clearly has no intention in doing any of the things a normal bag usually does. It leans into the impracticality that runs through high fashion and textile-based art objects, where function quietly gives way to display, experimentation, and a kind of deliberate over-serious delicacy. What results is something both precise and slightly absurd: stable in construction, fragile in behaviour, and familiar enough to recognise.
That same logic of proximity—where things feel close without being fixed—also appears in how materials are sourced. Xiao describes how certain fibres can feel like “home,” even when she is far away. 1After completing her MA in Textile at Chelsea College of Arts, Xiao has continued working in London, where weaving remains the central method through which form is constructed.
She begins with loose sketches, but these function less as plans than as starting conditions. The final form only takes shape through weaving, through a chain of small, responsive decisions made in relation to how the material behaves in real time. Sourcing becomes part of making itself: a way of staying in contact with places and practices across distance, without turning them into symbols or reducing them to reference.
But what does it mean to look at textiles this way—where meaning is not assumed in advance, but has to be followed as it forms? Xiao’s practice keeps circling this question, holding interpretation close to the weave itself. In doing so, it shifts attention away from what textiles are expected to represent, and toward how they are made, as that making continues to shape what they become.
Across her practice, textiles function as systems of relation rather than representation. They gather labour, movement, and perception into a single field of organisation, where nothing sits fully apart from what it touches. And perhaps what Xiao’s work ultimately returns us to is this: textiles are not only what they show. They are also how quickly we decide what they are—and what it takes to stay with them long enough for that decision to loosen.
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