I use performance, video and installation to explore notions of “home” and “homeland”. As a mixed race child of Vietnamese immigrant mother and an Irish-American father, who was a career diplomat, my sense of home has always been fluid and changing. I was conceived in Vietnam and born in the U.S. In a sense, I was exiled before I was born and lived most of my life as an expatriate. My art practice is about exploring these disjointed identities that co-exist in my body and this ever-present search for home. More than the emotional and physical sense of home, I am interested in the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and spirituality shape this construct. Through my work, I investigate issues such as war and memory, transnational identity and belonging, and multiple identities and its attendant baggage. In my recent work, I am grappling with ideas of food justice and labor.
Through social practice and relational aesthetics my performances explore notions of home, memory, “synaesthesia”, community, and authenticity. Sometimes, it is about food that reminds me of a place I once called home, a memory or feeling of a place. Sometimes, it is just about a moment. Sometimes, it is about a confluence of temporal and spatial realms in a particular space. It is always about food. As a bit of a nomad, food has always been anchor to a place that for me has never really existed – a place called home. My current work is an exploration of the performance of, appropriation and misappropriation of identity and culture through food. I am curious how memory, nostalgia and self become mediated and negotiated through a relationship to food and culture. I am playing with alternative forms of narrative storytelling using food as a medium. Using food, humor, narrative and conceptual structures, I develop work that is invested in collective engagement, to further social justice and cultural understanding.
Whether it is a large-scale edible Gingerbread nuclear reactor, an intimate themed dinner, hors d’hoeurves and drinks, hotpot or sausage homages my work engages the viewer in multiple senses, taste, sight, smell, as well as through a narrative story and a conversation. I call this a “synaesthetic” experience, a term I designed to embrace all aspects of what I have developed in my approach to my performances. It includes the visual presentation of the food, the stories and narratives that shape the menus, the history and socio-political constructs that are explored in the crafting of the food, and the experience of tasting of the food itself. I spent a decade organizing low income, immigrant community members, youth and workers around environmental justice, social justice and workers rights. These values reflect in my art practice and connect food, not just as a marker of place or a narrow version of cultural identity but in a larger context of power relations, globalization, and capitalism. My installation work utilizes similar gastronomic based visual aesthetic and uses food to telegraph a story about the invisibility of labor in the food industry or the universal search for love.
Through social practice and relational aesthetics my performances explore notions of home, memory, “synaesthesia”, community, and authenticity. Sometimes, it is about food that reminds me of a place I once called home, a memory or feeling of a place. Sometimes, it is just about a moment. Sometimes, it is about a confluence of temporal and spatial realms in a particular space. It is always about food. As a bit of a nomad, food has always been anchor to a place that for me has never really existed – a place called home. My current work is an exploration of the performance of, appropriation and misappropriation of identity and culture through food. I am curious how memory, nostalgia and self become mediated and negotiated through a relationship to food and culture. I am playing with alternative forms of narrative storytelling using food as a medium. Using food, humor, narrative and conceptual structures, I develop work that is invested in collective engagement, to further social justice and cultural understanding.
Whether it is a large-scale edible Gingerbread nuclear reactor, an intimate themed dinner, hors d’hoeurves and drinks, hotpot or sausage homages my work engages the viewer in multiple senses, taste, sight, smell, as well as through a narrative story and a conversation. I call this a “synaesthetic” experience, a term I designed to embrace all aspects of what I have developed in my approach to my performances. It includes the visual presentation of the food, the stories and narratives that shape the menus, the history and socio-political constructs that are explored in the crafting of the food, and the experience of tasting of the food itself. I spent a decade organizing low income, immigrant community members, youth and workers around environmental justice, social justice and workers rights. These values reflect in my art practice and connect food, not just as a marker of place or a narrow version of cultural identity but in a larger context of power relations, globalization, and capitalism. My installation work utilizes similar gastronomic based visual aesthetic and uses food to telegraph a story about the invisibility of labor in the food industry or the universal search for love.