Teach Me How to Fish

EVENT DESCRIPTION

For generations, the nexus between food and identity within the Asian diaspora was a relationship cultivated through sustained exigency. Culinary rituals, carefully repeated, preserved and passed on, were vital for sustenance and survival, continuity and community-critical lifelines tethering immigrants to the past, to the ancestral homelands they left behind, while affirming identity, belonging, and security in the present. How is this nexus shifting for newer generations navigating their diasporic identities against hyper-globalization, neo-colonialism, and the hybridization, commodification, and cannibalization of cultural practices? As disparate cultures continue to coalesce, intermingle, evolve, or even dissipate, how are we to understand notions of authenticity, tradition, and heritage?

Borrowing from the ancient proverb (itself with contested origins) “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”, the exhibition TEACH ME HOW TO FISH assembles diverse voices from the Asian diaspora of the present generation. Are we hunting, consuming, and subsisting in this world in a manner different than what was taught by our ancestors? How are we fishing, so to speak, for answers about our contested, marginalized, exoticized, and romanticized histories, our fragmented hybrid selfhoods, our homes, and our futures? The constellation of works creates pockets of meditative spaces facilitating ruminations on food as markers of identity and belonging, mediums of nostalgia, trauma, and loss, and mediators in the negotiation of diaspora politics.

Featuring work by Elizabeth Atterbury, Peter Hong-Tsun Chan, Hyegyeong Choi, Dominique Fung, Kyoko Hamaguchi, Sally J. Han, Olivia Jia, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Ji Woo Kim, Mike Lee, Zoe Blue M., Stephanie H. Shih, Miko Veldkamp, Lily Wong, Miyeon Yi, Yesiyu Zhao, Gongmo Zhou