THE (RE-)CONSTRUCTION OF SELF ON THE KITCHEN ISLAND is a RC unfinished project which hasn't been publicly presented yet. 

I use images and videos of my kitchen and (part of) my cooking processes - attempting to map my current foodpractice and (indoor) foodscapes to reflect my transnational living status. 

The background is a grid weaved by my perosnal feelings of being a non-local, these words are either positive, neutral and negative. 

Two key elements are: Objects/Equipments, Cooking techniques

VIDEOGRAPHY

I use images and videos as the main elements in this experimental project, instead of texts. 

Food is associated with body if we can use imagery form to document or re-/present the activities around food, it might reduce the risk of lossing information while translating embodied experince into textual output. 

I think it's a method can contribute to the research on food.

SURPSSING THE BEELINE is a storytelling dining event that I take part as one storyteller.  

The dishes that were prepared by the storytellers were all inked to perosnal interpretation of home. I presented a food that we eat for breakfast or lunch in Taiwan. But through sharing this food with the visitors, I talked about what I missed about the food culture of Taiwan was not really about the flavors or tastes, it's more about the whole experience, that you go to a breakfast shop and select one, two or more dishes from a menu of almost a hundred options. You start your day by going out for food, to wait in cue, to be exposed in a busy, crowded but energetic space. Yes, talking about food and home might be related to the food itself, but more about the whole bodily experience. 

STORYTELLING

Storytelling in this project has less structured rules. Each storyteller has prepared their own stories, but how the stories were told, in a uninterrupted pace or in a coversational form with the audience, were decided at the moment of storytelling, depending on how interactive the audiences are. Storytelling here plays a role in providing background information of the food that the audience are eating. So arousing the awareness that food is not just something atable, but something personal with stories behind. 

A DINING EVENT

Eating togehter is a social activity as we all know. 

                                                                                                Research Objectives

I = YOU - A ONE-ON-ONE STORYTELLING PERFORMANCE took place around a long dining table. Nine plates of food/ingredients were displayed on two sides of the table. Behind each food there is my personal story as a non-local living in Europe, and we (the audience and I) use these stories and/or food to share our perosnal memories or experiences. 

By the end of the storytelling performance, I used an overhead projector to present the last dish - hot pot, a typical Chinese/Taiwanese cuisine, in which the dinners usually cook all the ingredients together in the same soup base. I use the hot pot to illustrate the conversation between him/her and I is similiar to eating a hot pot together, that you have to be flexible - sometimes take the leading position and sometime compromise to the others. 

STORYTELLING

Storytelling is a catalyst in this project. It triggers dialogue between me and the participant. Depending on which food (&story) is chosen by the participant, it will influence the direction and content of the following conversations. 

VIDEOGRAPHY (in the form of LIVE projection)

Live projection gives an extra layer of "theatrical" vibe in this very much dialogue-based performance. 

 24 CHIEH-CHI RECIPES FOR CITY OF ATHENS is a one-month residency project in collaboration with an illustrator and artist Ching-Yu Cheng and Foundation Vicotoria Square Project in Athens. 

In this project, Ching-Yu and I take the concept of 24 Solar system in Chinese culture to design 24 food recipes by combining the cooking techiniques and ingredients from both Taiwanese and Greek food cultures. 

We organised three food events during the one month residency. The first event: we were doing try-out tasting in a local Sunday market; the second event: Frying food stoll in the afternoon; the first event: a dinner with 24 dishes with the residents in the neighourhood. 

We also produced a recipe book which provide the steps for making these 24 dishes. 

HANDCRAFTING

What I mean about handcrafting in this project is the action of cooking. I was the main person to cook during this residency project, cooking is an emboided action that make you really experience the kitchen space. When working with food/ingredients, you will have to also working with time. 

During the residency, I cooked in our little kitchen at the Greek apartment and also cooked along the street in front of the Foundation. The "place" where the cooking will take place, is an important part in composing the cooking experience. 

A DINING EVENT 

People eat together in this project. The dining event plays a role in bringing people together to have conversation. In the tasting event, people interacted with us on the street. In the food stoll event, people talked to us as they needed to order what food they wouldl ike to eat, but also people stayed around the stoll while eating their food, they chatted with each other. The third dinner event, the guests were interacting with each other. Their sharing is beyond the food itself. 

THE STORYTELLING OBJECTS is an interactive sound installation created during a three-month residency at European Ceramics Work Center (EKWC) in Oisterwijk, Netherlands. I use 6 perosnal stories from a performance I made in 2021 as the base. All the stories are related to food and also about my living expereinces as a non-local in Europe.

After learning some basic knowledge about the characters, categories and techniques of clay, I started to translate and transform my personal stories into a ceramics sculpture. Eventually these sculptures will be carry actual food and be used in a new storytelling performance. 

To close my residency at EKWC, I showed this series of sculptures in the form of exhibition - visitors are invited to sit around a long dining table and scan the QR code, then they will hear a shorter version of my food stories connected to that piece of work in front of them.  

HANDCRAFTING

An important lesson I learned through this residency is, clay is a very performative material. When processing this material, you are basically not controlling it, but observe its status (how dry/moist) it is and use it accordingly. A clay body has to be fired in very high temerature before using it, otherwise it's very fragile. Fire, is another uncontrollable process, even there is just 5 degree differences, some visible differences can be possibly seen on the results. Working with clay is really about working "with" it, not about "using" it in the work. 

I see the potential to use clay in the PhD research, as food utensils are mostly made from clay/procelain. and it is another visual form that translate thoughts into physical form, just like photography and drawings. 

HOME and BELONG

Three of the storytellers were temporarly moving into the Netherlands - for visiting partner, (a year contract) work and study. From their stories, it was not their intention to stay long in the Netherlands. 

One of the storyteller, she is a Taiwanese and moved to the Netherlands because of her marriage. In her performance, she used a lot of objects for her storytelling space, it represented her perception of feeling home - that she is surrounded by the objects brought from Taiwan. The objects she shared during the performance were books (related to some Chinese massage medical study books) and food-related products. 

Besides objects, she also mentioned the differences of landscapes between her home in Taiwan and here in the Netherlands, one is located on a hilly location and another one is very flate. 

She chose to speak Chinese during the performance, and used a screen next to her showing English translation. She said she doesn't feel comfortable to speak in English as her English skill is not advanced. 

DEPARTURE is a participatory storytelling performance. Four non-Dutch immigrants shared their personal experiences of leaving their home countries and relocated to the Netherlands. Their stories were divided into four chapters and the audience were also divided into four groups. The groups of audience alternated in the four storytelliers' rooms (they stayed in one room for one chapter and then moved on to the next room for next chapter). 

Each storyteller decided how to "design their stage" themselves, from what kind of images that would like to put on the wall to what objects they would like to use to support their storytelling. My role is more like a coach to provide feedbacks when they were developing the design of the space, I was also like a practitioner to provide solutions for practical matters. 

The audience could decide how much they would like to engage with the project, they could either be active by sharing their own experience, or be a silent listener to hear all the sharings. 

STORYTELLING

Storytelling is the main medium in this project. Although the audiences could at any moment ask questions or share their own thoughts, the main body of the performance was still the sharing of personal stories from the storytellers. 

SENSES

Besides hearing the stories. The major body sense that we used in this project is visual. In each room, we decorated the spaces according to each storyteller's story and we also drew maps on the walls to indicate how they travelled from home country to the Netherlands. The visual objects and elements helped the audience to be able to physicalize the stories that heard from the storytellers. 

MAPDRAWING

It's very interesting to see how different people select different information to put on the map, and the style of orienting themselves in reltaion to the city where they are living in. Some drew the map according to our geographic orientations (south is at the bottom, north is at the top), some drew the map by their own sesne of orientation (so, drew a line towards right if they had to turn right), some of them only drew locations. 

The informations on these maps are really fascinating and show clearly of that person's everyday life. But I think "the process of drawing" is also interesting to observe: what was drawn the first? and when/how the informations were added?

Some participants mentioned to me, they were aware of the geographic locations of certain shops before, until they drew the map then they realised the shops are actually almost next to each other on the same street. 

DRAW AN EMPIRICAL FOOD MAP is a workshop I organised that took place in 2021. The participants were all Taiwanese immigrants who live in the Netherlands for different reasons, most of them are working, some are having family (with Taiwanese, Dutch and Italian partners, and with kids) and a few are students.  

I invited them to first write a story, imagining there will be a friend coming to have lunch or dinner at their place. what will they cook or eat? and then after the writing, I asked them to draw a map to indicate their trip to collect the ingredients for that dining event with frined. On the map, they could indicate not only the locations of those shops, but also their routes, and personal memories/remarks of those places or routes. They could also draw the space in their house, kitchen or dining space. 

HOME and BELONG

Many participants showed on the map that they do their grocery from both Chinese grocery stores and Dutch supermarkets (or open markets). 

Almost all the participants eat Taiwanese/Chinese food for lunch and dinner daily. and when there is a dining event with friends, they will usually cook Taiwanese food. 

Many participants mentioned they miss the convenience in Taiwan in terms of getting food from street. It is sometimes challenging to still think about doing grocery and cooking after a whole day of working. Many people do eat take away often. 

They joined this workshop for having a chance to meet the other Taiwanese and to share challenges they are facing on this topic (about food as a Taiwanese in the Netherlands) and also wanting to gather information about where to get certain ingredients (for example, a good quality of pork meat, a specific herb). 

Morning Meal is a participatory storytelling performance. In this project, we (it is a collaborative project with the sound designer Kristina Mau Hansen) focus on talking about the sounds that we heard during the breakfast. The personal stories have two main parts: breakfast in the past and breakfast nowadays. 

We started with sharing Kristina and my own breakfast stories. and then we invited the audience, who were already sitting in groups, to open a box in which we prepared questions, colour pens and papers. They were invited to draw/write their anwsers on the papers. They could chat and share with the others during the process. To close the whole experience, all the papers were collected and hung in the front, and everyone came together to read the papers, discuss the whole experience.

STORYTELLING

Storytelling is used as a way to lead the participants enter the situation, be introduced to the theme and frame/guide their angles to think about their own breakfast experience. 

SENSES

hearing, is the main sense in this project. It is the information that we want to know from our participants. The sounds can be from the making of breakfast, can also be from the space (indoor, outdoor) and can also be the conversations between people who partake in the breakfast together. 

DRAWING

Drawing is the format that we chose for the output, for translating the "sounds of breakfast" into a visual form. 

HOME and BELONG

In this project, I share the story about eating bread for breakfast. Bread is my breakfast everyday these days, and I consciously choose to have bread for breakfast. Because I know it is not possible to have the same breakfast experience in the Netherlands (neither the authentic types of food, nor the eating experience itself), so I decide not to mimic the Taiwanese breakfast that I had back in Taiwan, but, just eat something simple without thinking about it. 

I notice that I start to have preference for bread, and I can analyze about why I like certain bread. I also start to have a map in mind for good bread in the areas that I come across in daily life. It is, probably, a sign of being in the process of home-making. This awareness of acknowledging the process of home-making gives me the sense of belonging, that I feel I am becoming part of the Dutch society. 

This is a temporal order between the home-making and the sense of belonging. The starting point is choosing to eat the local food, instead of food from home country. 

A STORYTELLING FOOD TOUR IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD - FOREIGN BODY, FOREIGN STORY, FOREIGN PLACE is part of the Non Native Native Online Art Fair. It is a city walk that people can book different (food) stories online and I will compose them into one walking tour. I

The person who booked the walk has to indicate his/her located city and neighbourhood, so I can customise the tour. There are 6 different food stories, and the stories are my personal memories related to that dish. I also describe how to make those dishes here in the Netherlands. 

The walk is about going to various supermarkets or grocery stores to see where I purchase the ingredients to make the dish. and during the walk, I told the stories. 

A WALK

I wanted to see if it's possible to change the participants' perception of the environment that they are familiar with into a "theatrical" place. My way in achieving this is by adding a scripted storytelling during a walk. When we walk inside the shops, they are not doing grocery, but listening to a scripted, prepared storytelling performance. and the stories are about somewhere far away from the Netherlands, that creates another layer of sense of disorientation. 

Even without the stories, a group of people walk in the supermarket/shops but not doing the grocery, is already a performance (from both the perspectives of the passers-by and the walkers). 

STORYTELLING

The scripted storytelling brings another performative layer to the walk in this project. All the stories are related to Taiwan, a country far away from the Netherlands, and are my personal memories (not the spectators'). The storytelling turns the walking tour from a performance into a theatre play. 

In Urban Gallery, the participants were given a map and a "framing device". It was a walking project - a walk inside a parking lot, we walked from the ground floor towards the most top floor. 

The participants were invited to use the "framing device" which is rectanglur boxes with various shapes of openings to look through. 

This project was made one month after I moved to the Netherlands. 

A WALK

In this walking project, the participants had very little instructions and rules. A few stop points were given and the route was indicated on the map. They could choose what or which direction to look and how long they would like to stay at one stop. This walking project is to create space for them to experience the city Utrecht and a (quite standardised) functional building - parking lot differently. 

SENSES

- Visual

Visual comes as the first and important sense in the project. Through the given framing devices, the space and the surrounding were experienced differently - Some things are focused by the framing (and at the same time, some things are blocked out). The space surrounding the parking lot suddnly is not experienced as a whole, but fragmented scenes. 

HOME and BELONG

I created this project one month after I arrived in the Netherlands. When everything in Utrecht were new and foreign to me,  I chose a parking lot which was connected to a shopping mall next to the central station. 

As a newcomer, this (pretty standard) parking lot was not at all normal. From the colours used in the space, architectural material, to even the distant views that were framed by the space of the parking lot, everything were new. I chose this parking lot because I felt I am not belonged to here, I am an foreigner. 

After almost 9 years of living in the Netherlands, if I will make an updated versio of Urban Gallery, will I still choose this parking lot? how will I decide the space?