Fabric is like air, it’s everywhere.
—Artist Woomin Kim
As a maker and museum worker, I’m often struck by how art making mimics acts of cooking. Wedging clay for ceramics uses muscles that become useful when you’re kneading bread, and the patience needed for a long, slow project like beading or knitting pays off when you have a particularly tedious task like shelling beans or peeling chestnuts. For many, working at a museum means looking at artworks for long stretches of time, constantly searching for details that might provide new insight into an artwork you have already seen dozens of times. Through the lens of curating the upcoming exhibition From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art, I’ve come to recognize close-looking at art as exercising the same muscles and skills we would associate with eating and food preparation. A personal highlight has been drawing connections between the new textile acquisition Shijang: ChungGwaMul (fruits and vegetables) by Woomin Kim and the Sumatran Tapis Pucuk Rebung (Bamboo Shoot Tapis). By putting textile works that come from different traditions into conversation with each other, I have found that one’s fluency in visual languages tends to parallel one’s history of eating.
Woomin Kim’s Shijang: ChungGwaMul is a quilted still life of a fruit and vegetable shijang—a market, market stall—hailing from Kim’s Shijang series, which depicts different snapshots of various shijang and the vastness of their offerings. From the fabric store to the seafood section, Kim’s keen eye for capturing the subtle details of each shijang creates a still life where viewers can experience the presence of people through the natural arrangement of lived-with objects alone—even though the figures themselves are rarely depicted outright.
Woomin Kim’s research and preparatory process for the Shijang series itself is deeply tied to her own experiences of growing up visiting shijang, and she cites them as a one of things she is most homesick for. Even before beginning work on the Shijang series, Kim had collected thousands of photos of shijang from her visits home and travels across South Korea. When she begins work on one of her quilts, she will consult different photos in her shijang archive and plan out the quilt’s composition with a sketch. Still, the final arrangement is never from a single source as such but is instead the culmination of different shijang and Kim’s memories.
In learning about Kim’s process, I was struck by how intuitive it is. To find the “correct” spot for each piece in her quilt, Kim draws upon her deep familiarity with her subjects. Kim shares that each “ingredient” is created as its own appliqué patch, and the patches are then pieced together into a whole composition that feels natural. This process, in fact, replicates how shijang vendors themselves figure out how to arrange their goods to be most appealing to customers. In turn, viewing the quilt feels like looking at food in a supermarket—scanning a variety of produce, maybe looking for a specific ingredient or an especially tasty dish. In this work, my eye first goes to the chamoe, the striped, yellow melons that are placed as the centerpiece of this still life. Which one looks best? Which one will be sweetest? If I were shopping for these in a market, I would weigh a few in my hands, looking for one that hasn’t been dented, bruised, or scratched, and I might recall the word-of-mouth advice I heard from an auntie once, that you should smell for sweetness to check if a melon will be ripe for eating. Kim also emphasized how she gravitated to shijang as a subject because they respond to and reflect hyper-local needs. You could visit one to quell a craving for a specific kimchi, buy a new umbrella if it suddenly starts raining, and get your knives sharpened, all in the same block.
Exhibited next to Kim’s Shijang: ChungGwaMul are two rotations of Sumatran tapis, embroidered tunics worn for Indonesian special occasions. Tapis patterns have established and specific names coded with images from real life that form a consistent visual language. The two tapis exhibited here were selected because they are woven with a triangular motif that forms the pucuk rebung, or bamboo shoot, pattern. Outside of Asia, bamboo is often recognized as a decorative plant or potential building material but maybe less known as a valued food source and material for utensil making. Shoots can only be picked and eaten when the bamboo plant is first sprouting—wait too long and the plant becomes too fibrous and tough to eat. The fact that the pucuk rebung pattern was named after a food source and created with gold-thread embroidery implies that this staple food is as valuable as gold.
It also speaks to how common these foods are that a simple triangle or circle motif can be named after bamboo shoot (or breadfruit, as in the image below). Because bamboo shoots and breadfruit are traditionally wild foods, the act of acknowledging these shapes as specific, named patterns parallels the act of foraging to find them. Just as an experienced forager can recognize what is edible from a dense thicket and confidently identify its quality from learned experience, the people who create, wear, and live with tapis are adept at recognizing these abstracted patterns and their symbolism for everyday life.
2009.98.33. NOTE: the slightly spiked circle motifs in this tapis are breadfruit, a starchy fruit that originated in the Pacific islands and is now a staple across Southeast Asia as well as the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America.
Originally paired thanks to their shared medium as textiles, Shijang: ChungGwaMul and the Tapis Pucuk Rebung contribute different cultural perspectives upon the significance of our foodways. While working with both these artworks, I’ve been interested in the experience of familiarity: Who will immediately recognize a chamoe or bamboo shoot and connect the visual experience of seeing these artworks with a sensory memory of taste? And how is their experience of these works different from those who will be learning about these foods for the first time?
Certain foods and their cultural specificities supply us with a map of our lived experiences. What we eat (and especially what we like to eat) is not solely defined by our ethnicity; in fact, our tastes develop into records of where we’ve lived and whom we’ve eaten with. Eating local foods also opens you up to influences from the communities with deep roots in the places you settle. As I consider these lineages of influences while spending time with these artworks, I am also reminded of how my current place will affect my tastes (and life) moving forward. And though Korea and Indonesia are often described as “different worlds,” and Asian culture is viewed as fundamentally different from a Western way of life, the essence of a shijang or the skills of foraging bamboo shoots can be found locally in the presence of Community Supported Agriculture and farmers markets here in our pocket of New England as well. Kim shared with me that when she shows her Shijang series to international audiences, viewers immediately recognize the similarities with their own local open markets, food stalls, and bazaars, highlighting the universal aspect of these experiences.
As Shijang: ChungGwaMul and the tapis share space with other artworks and histories in the exhibition, I hope audiences will use them to come up with their own interpretations, rooted in their own experiences, localities, and foodways.
This post was authored by: Jayde Xu, Hood Museum Board of Advisors Mutual Learning Fellow
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jayde Xu is the Mutual Learning Fellow for Education and Public Programming. Formally trained as a visual artist, Jayde graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in illustration and humanistic studies. Her studio practice focuses on mixed media and intersections of drawing and language. Most recently Jayde worked in visitor experience at Glenstone museum, with former intern projects at the Young Readers Center in the Library of Congress and the Globe Collection and Press.
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