My Ration Market project took on a new development in its Ration Eater iteration. The artwork was presented at The Plumb in a show curated by Callum Schuster, called “On a Table, Over Time”.
Ration Eater features a sculpture as well as a tasting event wherein guests can eat an actual bowl of the rau muong/ river spinach-ration congee that was advertised for sale in my Ration Market Special sculpture. The food that was served is a simple congee made with salt, water, and jasmine rice, that is then topped by a slurry of blended rau muong and then garnished with fried shallots. For me, the work was a way to bring the fiction of Ration Market further into life. At the tasting event, guests were encouraged to bring their own bowl and spoon, which for me as an artist, generates a mise-en-scene of a provisional sharing canteen.
The event for Ration Eater was brilliantly accompanied by the curator of the show, Callum, who prepared a cocktail revolving around the Vietnamese herb, Rice Paddy Herb/Ngo Om. An herb that came over to the Americas through the arrival of refugees from Vietnam. Callum had concentrated the rice paddy herb into a simple syrup paired with coconut water, Cointreau, Tanqueray, among other ingredients.
It was my first “relational work”, an activity that brought an intimate depth to the Ration Market project.
The event seemed like a fitting way to mark what feels like the closing of a chapter, with the openings of my three-years-in-making project, After the Cataclysm, Before the Storm, and my show of photographs and computer manufactured images in Destiny Is Not A Good Friend at Hunt Gallery. This period between March and April distills everything that I’ve been working on for three years—when I returned to Toronto in January 2020 after half a year working in Guangzhou, Jakarta, and Ho Chi Minh City, right before the pandemic.
It was a period of breakthrough development, I lived with the folks from HB Station / SJT / Boloho / Fong Fo and Gudskul / Serum / ruangrupa in the lead-up to their Documenta projects which in hindsight, imparted upon me a deep sensitivity to the spatial, political, material characteristics of the places around me. It untethered me from thinking about art production within silos, and to pay attention to the vernacular of culture (in the Bourdieu-sense) around me. To make art that may look less like art and more like the things around its means of production. This I believe, is a path towards continued experimentation.
