Pat-Ka-Chiòng

Pat-Ka-Chiòng is a ritual procession of 8 guardians when Mazu and other Gods start their patrol in local areas in Taiwan. They catch the bad spirits before Gods’ arrival. Therefore, their makeup, costumes and gestures represent specific meanings with fearful aesthetics to scary away those demons.
When I was little, it was always a terrifying experience to watch the temple festival. Their looks, especially the makeup, together with the movement and sounds always gave me a nightmare after watching them in the daytime. Therefore, I always want to recontextualise scary or conventional looks with a fresh image so people can embrace and enjoy tradition in a new way.

The mask design gets inspiration from the tufting technique. These days, tufting become a popular textile manipulation for the public as a leisure activity or even a therapy. It usually takes up to 3 hours to put on traditional Pat-Ka-Chiòng makeup, therefore, I wanted to create masks to replace the makeup and as a textile practitioner, I would like to explore textile techniques to produce the masks. The original plan was to tuft on the tufting fabric as the majority would do, however, forming a mask with tufted fabric is not easy. Through experimentation, the eureka moment arrived with the idea of tufting on fencing mask as the base for hand-tufting to create the makeup pattern

My research passion lies in redesigning traditional garments by hacking conventional techniques with modern textile manipulation methods. In 2018, I have redesigned the Beijing Opera costumes for Farewell My Concubine, and Cantonese Opera costumes for The Peony Pavilion in 2023. This time, I would like to trace back my cultural root of Taiwanese religion folklore, Pat-Ka-Chiòng, using textile manipulations to reinterpret the aesthetics.

This design collection paved new direction for modernising religious costume. This type of temple festival is very popular in Taiwan for more than a century, and it brought the possibility and new imagination and adopted cutting edge technology to illustrate the aesthetics that represent current taste.