Square Deal Residency

From October 2025 to May 2026, artist Keng Keng Tang worked with communities in Huntly to weave practices of mutual care and rest through the five senses. This work formed the first Square Deal residency.

Whilst on residency, Keng Keng took Square Deal community hub as a starting point, delving into ways that the space could hold and foster comfort, stories, mutual learning and care. Engaging our five senses - taste, sight, smell, sound, and touch - Keng Keng hosted workshops and events that connected with radical textile histories and practices. She stitched together local skills and textile cultures, experimentation, and embodied knowledge to explore the potentials of shared spaces like Square Deal. Through this, Keng Keng asked how mutual care and rest can be embodied and facilitated by a community, and the spaces we occupy. If Square Deal was a quilt, what would its fabrics be, and who would be telling its stories?

Keng Keng Tang (she/they) is a textile artist, activist and experimental milliner originally from Yunnan, Southwest China, now based in Glasgow.  She has been involved with various community-based racial, environmental and social justice movements around Scotland and in London.Their work has centred on communal sharing of personal memories and collective resting, using textile practices as a medium of connection. She regularly runs workshops focussed on facilitating marginalised groups to story-tell through specific textile techniques - sewing, mending, weaving, printing and natural dyeing.

The Square Deal residency forms part of our new COMMUNITY programme strand, which holds space for learning the skills, histories and politics of community building, so we can organise together around the things that matter.

About the artist

Keng Keng Tang (she/they) is a textile artist, activist and experimental milliner originally from Yunnan, Southwest China, now based in Glasgow. She has been involved with various community-based racial, environmental and social justice movements around Scotland and in London.Their work has centred on communal sharing of personal memories and collective resting, using textile practices as a medium of connection. She regularly runs workshops focussed on facilitating marginalised groups to story-tell through specific textile techniques - sewing, mending, weaving, printing and natural dyeing.