Janine YC Lai | Proposal for Rhapsody Tentacular, 2024

INGESTATION - a SLOWed unhurried passing down of rituals, through making tung yuan, and experiencing themaking Taiwanese street food. 

Make tung yuan with the audience from dough. Invite audience to think of food as information for the body, through slow making slow chewing slow ingesting. Fry the tung yuan Dress the tung yuan. Eat the tung yuan. Serve the tung yuan.

Description

Ingestation will take place across several stages: first, as an interactive installation, where the audience isinvited to partake in the making of tung yuan from dough. They then are invited to bring it to the fryer to either try frying it for themselves and/or others, dressing it with prepared condiments, and serve it to themselvesand/or others.

Notes on Ingestation

So often food is taken for granted as a hurried act. By making the food ourselves, experiencing the process in its entirety from nothing to something, we can often experience euphoria. The other aspect of Ingestation is by stepping into the sensorial experiences of making a Taiwanese street food, with the smells wafting through the air,serving ourselves and others, experiencing the process of preparation as a streetfood vendor, we glimpse into their everyday existence. The food is then required to be ingested slowly, as it is fried to naturally form into these molecular structures, and they are very hot, so slow pulling apart and slow careful consumption is also part of thebody’s informational intake.

Traditionally, tung yuan 湯圓 is a boiled glutinous rice dessert made with a center filled with pork lard and sugar that originated in the Song dynasty, China. Since then, the tung yuan has evolved to being fried andfillingless, and part of a myriad array of fried Taiwanese streetfood staples such as yensuji 鹽酥雞, Taiwanese friedpopcorn chicken, taro cakes, squid balls, and the likes.

The name tung yuan is also interchangeable with yuan shiao 元宵, which, coincidentally on the opening of Rhapsody Tentacular, is the day to eat tung yuan or yuan shiao, as they symbolize togetherness, on the first full moon of thelunar calendar.

Janine YC Lai is a New York and Taiwan-based storyteller through the means of food and culture. Growing up in a Taiwanese fried porkchop restaurant, with the palate of Taiwanese flavors engrained in her DNA, she could not escape the fate that is reenacting the food she grew up with, and in a Divinely Timed manner, sharing it with the world now. She endeavors the realm of culinary arts through the lens of widening the perception of what Taiwaneseness is, and definitely asserts the flavors through her re-enactments and channeling of generational food. Her food aims to straddle preserving the old way of doing things, and new world futurism, it is what some might call, “an old Taiwanese lady trapped in the body of an avant garde Aquarian neoteric”. Cooking is a meditation for Janine. It is when she connects with the ultra-subconscious, in the theta state, through the lineage of ancestry, all at once channeling all the mothers and grandmothers before her. it is psychedelic, to say the least. 

Her latest projects include a group show currently on view until the end of February at Thomas VanDyke Gallery, Maiden’s Prayer, and sharing Taiwaneseness en masses at the Pioneer Works’ Climate Futurismscience talk, as well as their Second Sunday programming, and their Press Play Fair.