The Kitchen is a one-day gathering of art, design, music, and food with works by sixteen artists and countless participants who together presented, consumed, discussed, and lived the artworks.
It is at once an exhibition, a meal, a concert, a theatre, and a party. Like Ben Brantley’s review of The Kitchen in New York, we also wanted to be “a mess … a sticky, goopy, embarrassing, all-over-the-place and absolutely necessary mess.”
We named this gathering The Kitchen as an ode to the eponymous multi-disciplinary exhibition and performance space founded in New York in 1971; and as an homage to the experimental artist collective Fluxus, whose engagement with mixed-means performance and emphasis on blurring the artist-audience boundary immensely guided our development of this event.
Last October, Angela Yang and I hosted a small luncheon, with the intent of subverting meal conventions and exploring the aesthetic potential of food. This event was created in response to the instigative works by the likes of Laila Gohar and Esther Choi.
While planning a part II in the back of our minds, I met Karin Yamada in Mexico City, who became the first artist to join us. Shortly thereafter, the three of us met for breakfast where we shared our research and recent work and that discussion broadened our field of view, challenging us to involve more creatives and establishing a collective approach across art forms, between artist and attendees.
Within weeks, I had reached out through online and personal channels to gather sixteen artists from various disciplines. To avoid being prescriptive, it was entirely up to the artist to select which of their works to exhibit. We had unwittingly followed closely in Franz West’s footsteps in giving artists the freedom to display “absolutely anything at all that they liked.”
Many have asked what the future of the Kitchen looks like. I hope I’ll never be able to answer that question. If every iteration of the Kitchen is as unprecedented as the first two, then that is the only metric of “success” that has value to me. In both instances, I had no sense of how things would unfold, because we purposefully gaps in the programme where it was entirely up to chance. The Kitchen’s memorable moments all lay in the wholly collective and un-orchestrated happenings.
