1. Introduction

The Centre of Heritage, Arts & Textile (CHAT) is one of the three components of a converted multipart space renamed the Mills, together with the Mills Fabrica (a business incubator) and an ecostyle retail area. Located in the area of Tsuen Wan in Hong Kong, the former Nan Fung Textiles Ltd. initially consisted of six factories built between 1954 and 1970 by Chen Din Hwa, one of the many industrialists from Shanghai that brought capital and expertise to Hong Kong. In the late 1960s, the factories incorporated as the Nan Fung Group, and in the 1980s three of them were knocked down. Only three factories continued operations until 2008. At present, the Nan Fung Group is one of the leading property developers in Hong Kong.

The conversion project was launched in 2014, and the Mills was inaugurated in 2018. Its repurposing was supervised by the Nan Fung Group led by the granddaughter of the founder, Vanessa Cheung, who is also the mentor of the project and head of the group.

CHAT consists of three exhibition spaces: two galleries for contemporary art shows, and a third gallery named the D.H. Chen Foundation Gallery, where archive materials and industrial machines illustrative of the textile industry’s past are displayed. As part of its educational programme, CHAT also provides a textile workshop room open to the community.

CHAT’s main objective is to reconnect the industrial legacy and the local community, and to maintain a dialogue with international partners. Its programme frequently includes exhibitions, public talks, workshops and co-learning platforms as a way to raise awareness of former working conditions, industrial transformation, and ultimately, to restore textile techniques, such as spinning, weaving, and embroidery.

One of the aspects in which the Mills directly contributes to a debate on factory conversion concerns spatiality. The term is commonly accepted in architecture as a category that includes formal characteristics (size, width, height) and qualities (actions, elements, matter, and so on). David Harvey (1982, 2018) defines spatiality as a social construct, a product of the political economic system. In turn, Eric Sheppard (2012) proposes that we think about the concept of spatiality – spatialities – not only in close relation with time, but also as a concept that intersects various dimensions, namely geographical, environmental, social, political, and economical. 

Let’s see how these physical and conceptual attributes of spatiality converge in the Mills-CHAT recent conversion project, along with an overview of its history.