Inside The Fabrick Lab: meet Elaine Ng Yan-ling, the Hong Kong ‘material innovator’ whose creations have been courted by everyone from Swarovski and Lane Crawford, to Design Miami/Basel, UBS and even HKEX
- Elaine Ng Yan-ling credits fashion designer Zandra Rhodes as her first inspiration, but a visit to her Kwai Hing studio today feels more like an episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror
- She worked for Nissan in London and Nokia in Beijing before launching The Fabrick Lab, where the world textiles, interiors, biomimicry converge through the lens of sustainability; Ng’s piece Climatology was acquired by M+ museum in 2016
Elaine Ng Yan-ling may be a textile artist, but her studio looks like it belongs to a mad scientist. Located in a factory building in Kwai Hing, Hong Kong, the 1,500 sq ft space is crammed with a mish mash of objects that illustrate her multidisciplinary oeuvre.
Traditional hand-painted batik kimonos hang alongside a series of accessories-slash-artworks that move when exposed to different levels of humidity. Large pieces from interactive installations – some look like they’ve been taken from an episode of dystopian series Black Mirror – make it impossible to navigate the room. Despite this, two artists move seamlessly between an old school hand loom and its digital counterpart, while a 3D printer buzzes in the background.
“I believe that materials can open possibilities so I wanted to create a space where I could allow myself to be more cross-disciplinary. It’s about pushing boundaries,” says Ng, who is dressed in a chic jacquard skirt and vintage denim blazer – not a white lab coat in sight.
Ng has become known for her pioneering projects that see the worlds of textiles, interiors and biomimicry converge through the lens of sustainability. Her unconventional approach to materials has led to her being called everything from material innovator and creative consultant to materialogist (and the list goes on).
“I often ask myself how I would define what I do, but I don’t have an answer. I would get upset when people called me an artist in the past because I always wanted to be known as a designer. If you ask me now, I don’t mind because I’ve realised how much innovation there is in the art world,” she says.
Ng’s love for textiles goes back to her teenage years. As a student in boarding school in Yorkshire, she would spend most of her time in the textile and arts department experimenting. She ended up at the renowned Central Saint Martins school in London looking to pursue a degree in fashion, until her tutor suggested textile design instead.
“I loved prints – Zandra Rhodes was my original inspiration – and I knew how to make screens, so I bought a handknitting machine and started experimenting with textile construction, although I wasn’t sure what to do with the final product. That being said, textiles weren’t just fabrics. I was interested in learning other disciplines and applying them to the development process,” she says.
Ng went on to do a masters in Textile Futures before working for Nissan in London designing concept cars, and then as a colour material designer at Nokia in Beijing. During this time, she won several awards for her work exploring shape and memory materials, but she was hankering for more.