Evelyna Liang Yi-woo is unfurling a jumble of vibrantly coloured quilts at her Wong Chuk Hang studio. Each handicraft shows a tableau of daily life: a child playing, a woman tending a field, a family at dinner.
The needlework is a trip down memory lane, says Liang, who for two decades has been using fabric art to build confidence and community spirit among women's groups.
'I always keep the first piece the women make,' she says, fingering a blue square showing a mother and child gazing up at the stars. 'They think it's not their best work but that's where all the original ideas come from.'
For Liang, a stitch in time saves more than nine. As the women use embroidery and applique to voice their joys and suffering, a sisterhood is born.
'Stitching together pieces of discarded cloth into something beautiful is very symbolic,' she says.
Chinese grandmothers traditionally used cloth from neighbours to sew patchwork 'quilts of a hundred families' for newborn babies, handicrafts experts say. Such traditional crafts would become treasured family heirlooms, but Liang has long known how a needle and thread can mend modern lives. Born in Hong Kong and holding a masters degree in fine art from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology she first used fabric art in 1988 in detention camps for Vietnamese boatpeople.
'I wanted my students at the Chinese University, where I was teaching, to use art to help other people,' she says.