Deep fried painting, glass tank, sunflower oil, steel
140 x 105 x 70cm, Korean Cultural Institute, London UK & Berlin Germany 2021
In a cross over between the comfort of the kitchen and the dominion of the studio, it wasn’t a huge leap that any artwork should be submerged in hot oil. The alchemy of painting is surprisingly close to the recipes and materials of batter – egg yolk in tempera, linseed oil and pigments, the ground white powder of gesso, the heat and energy of hands. Both the space of the kitchen and the space of the studio operate as a lab of material transformation.
The process of frying rekindles a simpler time, when deep fried food wasn’t scowled at for its high calories and dizzying fat. How we think, feel and act is a direct consequence of the society that nourishes us, and as the working-class rise, taste has a cavalier way of expressing itself; it is articulated status or lack thereof. The most prestigious and revered cultural objects are those which have been consecrated by powerful institutions and people. Expressions of taste are assertions of power or powerlessness. Social inequities are reinforced, perpetuated on the basis of cultural distinction, invisible market forces lead us towards a cultural condescending of taste.
For the creation of an artwork, boundaries of taste must be relieved, for to really play with a city and its people you need to explore like an unbridled traveller, without the burden of history and veiled hierarchies.
Hot oil, re-fried over and over, glows like gold.
Great affliction precedes enlightenment. Highly caloric food bears the traces of less prosperous times, and can explain how the material conditions of existence have a significant effect on our choices. Deep frying is a ritualistic purging, originating from missionaries in Portugal who used it as a way to fulfil fasting and abstinence rules around the ember days, Quattuor Tempora. It travelled to the port of Nagasaki and detonated as a street food that later climbed from fish mongers to haute cuisine, fried food is part of a collective effervescence. Resplendent, silvered heat simmers, it is roasting, blazing in sterling brilliance the movement of foil drones.
Fry Up, behind the scenes at Dong Juan Chinese Takeaway, Park Royal
32 Thurloe Place, South Kensington
commissioned by Kensington and Chelsea Council and KCAW Public Art Trail