We are what we eat
I continued to research under still life and food photography as well as artists who deal with food.
I took a trip to Shanghai trying to find a current art gallery or artist who deals with foods as a subject in China. Also I took the chance to scan some local food inside plastic bags in Shanghai’s several local markets. There was this group work show called ”Interrupted Meal” in the How Museum. I was able to find several works that related to my practice. Here I posted two works from the exhibition. The first one is Joseph Beuys ” Food for Thought”1977. I have to say this work is very conceptual to look at. It’s a list of words mentioning some dishes that Beuys comes to mind when thinking about food. And a small poetry at the end. There is also a grease mark on the paper down below where he signed his name. What came in my mind was that western dishes are usually named like an equation. For example he wrote: Cheese & Onion soup. The ingredients are in the name of the dish, so straightforward, and so different from how foods are named in China. In China food names are often something that needs to be learnt culturally as most foods have a long history background and are often named with meanings embedded.For example we have this soup called HulaTang, and there is no way to name it with ingredient as it will take too many characters to do that. I think these also reflect how western thinkings are different from eastern thinking to a certain degree.
There was also this work called Shape of Appetite by Tang Han and Xiaopeng Zhou. A documentary video about food carving techniques in China.Which I think is a form that is the complete opposite of what plastic bag food stands for. Food carving is purely just a way for decoration. Normally it’s not edible. However, it often accompanies expensive dishes in high end restaurants. And it often takes a long time for a specialty chef to prepare. While plastic bag foods are fast, not considering presenting the food, only for convenience purpose. Yet beauty and oddity all exist in both two forms.
When looking at Daniel Spoerri’s “snare picture”, his process is generally to have a meal with a certain group of people and after everyone leaves the table he affixes everything on the table and puts it on the wall as an art piece to present. This raises my interest as he and Rirkrit are both dealing with leftover food, or I should say they both put interest in the process of food being eaten and leftover. And they both choose to present as it is. By using photography as a way to record the performance. When I read about these two artists' stories, what came to me is that they were both described as living a nomads life. Which I certainly relate with. I also noticed they are both male photographers and just like Gregg Segal and Dan Bannio, their works are very straightforward. I appreciated this way of show work, I think it's very effective in a powerful way visually, yet when I make my works I tend to think about ways to not be so obvious.
