Eat, in order to___
To ingest is to swallow a piece of memory, allowing it to leave an imprint deep within my body. The interweaving of experience and memory is my attempt to find a way to anchor myself in existence.
When everything around me feels like severed briars, my body becomes the sole sanctuary for who I am. What flows inside me becomes the only thread connecting past and present—an imprint clinging to my skin like a birthmark.
I once did a rough calculation: out of a seven-day week, I spend about 2.5 days walking into supermarkets. I also did another rough calculation: if the daily recommended limit for soy sauce is 30 ml, then in my lifetime so far, I have consumed roughly 385 liters of it.
These 385 liters have grown within me. These 385 liters have thrived within me.
I am not looking for my roots. I am not looking for a way back home. What I pursue is not a retrospective nostalgia. What I pursue is a sense of self-belonging, an expansion that surges from the soles of my feet and permeates my entire being.
Eating, as my self-reconstruction. Eating, as my self-rebirth.
I am from Taiwan. My practice spans installation, sensory experience, and writing, centering on food and the daily act of eating as the core site of my research and creation. When I relocated from Taiwan to the Netherlands, the familiar world was abruptly severed like briars. All that remained was myself, and everything I carried within—the flavors accumulated over a lifetime.
Food acts as a medium—not to reproduce culture, nor to replicate memory, but to investigate how these 385 liters came to dwell in my body. It explores how they guide me, yet allow me to stand between the unfamiliar and the familiar, growing into a new self. The diary-like murmurs and the gathering of temporal traces both bear witness to the intertwining of past and present, unfolding between metabolism and rumination.
This is the journey of reconstructing my belonging through flavor.
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Open Kitchen
12:30–14:30 / 18:00–20:00
Space open for viewing outside these hours.
