Open Kitchen 001_Assembly
April 18, 2024 - April 26, 2024
Light Up Global project space, 247 West 38 Street Floor 14.
Opening reception with a culinary performance by Daniel Pravit Fethke: April 18, 2024 6-8PM.
Artists:
Daniel Pravit Fethke, Greg Herbowy, Davina Hsu, Enzo Lee, Kyu Ho Lee, Li Xiaofei, Liu Shuishi, Wu Yuren, Xiong Wei, Xu Jin, Xue Zeyu, Youyi Echo Yan, Chengtao Yi, Annie Yuan Zhuang
“Open Kitchen - Assembly” turns the gallery into a representational and metaphorical “Open Kitchen” which is inspectable from within and without. The kitchen opens up on all ends: it extends to where the materials were found, zooms into how the materials are processed, and challenges how the “dishes” are presented. As a physical space, the “kitchen” also expands into being a living room, a coffee shop, a factory, a classroom, placing whatever the kitchen produces and prepares under various contexts.
Many of the artworks presented will have a direct reference to food, whether it’s an apple, an egg, a dried-up fish. However, the exhibition invites the viewers to inspect beyond the physical representations of these objects, and to question the social dynamics, identity crisis, and unstable conditions hidden behind. A few artists’ works will provide emotional connection towards the conception of “sourcing - processing - sharing,” providing a complex social backdrop for the seemingly harmless food items.
Referencing the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, “Open Kitchen - Assembly” places the framework of “relational art” under contexts that are up-to-date. The exhibition questions whether “art-art” and “art-people” relations might be examined under equivalent socio-political terms.
“Open Kitchen - Assembly” aims to raise timely social questions through the analogy between contemporary art and food preparation as the former is increasingly interwoven with social interaction and is becoming more and more transparent and “open.” The recent popularity of open kitchens (against traditional closed-up kitchens) extends traditional food experience into what happens prior to the completion of assemblage, comparable to how contemporary art is expanding to assimilating the process of sourcing and art-making into the final presentation. This diasporic ideology requires our attention to focus not solely on what is present to us at the last moment, but split into everything that is possibly “open” to us. We are humbly sharing what might be unexpected, as long as your appetite is primed for uncertainties.
“Open Kitchen - Assembly” asks the artists to “extend” and “open up” their existing works: whether it is an extended iteration of an existing work, a visual extension of existing works into the gallery’s physical space, or encorporating any “additives” or “preservatives” in whichever materials to elaborate how “food/art” is processed. Artists are encouraged and required to “mess up” the space in the process, so the “smells” will mesh, and “tastes” and “displayed” will be converged.
[Special thanks to Gia Zhang and Light Up Globals Inc. for making this exhibition possible]
All images courtesy of the artists, Light Up Globals Inc., and Li Xiaofei.