21/11/2025
Archive: Dirty Work
Archive: Dirty Work originates from an encounter with a fading industry that has slipped from public memory while still breathing beneath the city’s surface. What remains of Hong Kong’s garment manufacturing is not a heritage to be preserved but a living residue, a network of cutters, pressers and sewers whose labour was never designed for visibility. Their work was never meant to be seen, yet it continues to structure the silent underside of the city.
This project asks what production becomes after an industry collapses and only the hands remain. Each stitch is a timestamp, each hesitation a form of knowledge, each imperfection a record of presence. Rather than romanticising decline, Archive: Dirty Work treats the surviving gestures of garment making as evidence: fragments of rhythm, fatigue and precision that no digital system can replicate. These traces form a counter archive, not of objects but of persistence itself. In the seam, in the delay before a cut, in the warmth left by an iron, the city’s last form of continuity emerges.
What you hold here is not documentation. It is a refusal. A refusal to let manufacturing be rewritten as myth, a refusal to accept disappearance as neutrality. To look closely at a seam, at the tremor of cloth, at the calloused logic of repetition, is to rediscover a city that still knows how to make. Archive: Dirty Work asks the reader to see the garment not as product but as testimony. It insists that creation remains possible, that belief can still be rebuilt through labour, and that the final truth of a city often survives in the hands no one names.
To make is to care.
To continue is to believe.
Archive: Dirty Work
33 x 44 cm Lager Format
64pages, specialized offset printing
200 gsm Fine textured paper
Unbound with screen-printed PVC sleeve
Edition of 500
PRINT IN HONG KONG.
MADE IN HONG KONG.
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