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Sydney Shen
69 Favor Taste
69 Favor Taste
Gallery Vacancy is pleased to announce Sydney Shen’s media project 69 Favor Taste, including a series of podcasts and a public presentation, which is in conjunction with the Queen’s Museum’s Lunar New Year Celebration and is made possible with the help from the Queens Council on the Arts.
69 Favor Taste, borrowing its title from the popular All-You-Can-Eat Chinese hotpot and Korean Bbq restaurant 99 Favor Taste, NY, explores new themes and reframes the construction and consumption of Asian and Asian American identities through creative storytellings by contemporary artists, drawing from their personal, artistic, academic, and historical background. Approaching from the significance of food in Asian culture, each episode of the podcast is recorded over a meal in specifically chosen Asian restaurants in Queens, featuring guest artists with a wide range of topics from art, gastronomy, anthropology, to cannibalism. Inheriting her on-going artistic practice of walking the fine line between wonder and horror, Sydney Shen manipulates the tension between the enticement of gourmet and repulsive dread to test the limits of the psychological and biological body, pointing towards the deeper question about how contemporary identity is constructed sociologically and historically, as well as what lies beyond human knowledge. |
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In Episode 1, Sydney Shen and her co-host Jasmine Lee, along with guest artists Daniel Chew and Tin Nguyen of CFGNY, visit Hong Kong Food Court in Elmhurst to talk about cuteness, counterfeit, and culinary commodity. Starting with a partially made-up conspiracy horror theory of the chained-fast food restaurant Burger King, which establishes a sense of absurdity through the duality of entertaining and macabre, this episode speculates various subjects including the symbolic meaning of mascots in Asian culture, the differences between knock-offs and bootlegs of re-creation, and the social magnitude of meal gatherings.
And in Episode 2, Sydney and Lee adapt the podcast to the format of a variety show and present live at the Queen’s Museum’s Lunar New Year Celebration, including conversation with guest artist Spencer Yeh, a snack review by returning food critic Alex Ito, a reading by Charlie Markbreiter, and a music performance by “dies smely,” from whom 69 Favor Taste borrowed their podcast’s theme music. As the extension of her artistic practice, Shen hopes to discuss the phantom of the fictional reality that she’s been creating, directing, and performing beyond her sculptures and installations, but with the notion of oral tradition, which functions as the petri dish for uncanny folklores in its long history standing. Thus creates a bizarre yet motley perception of intimacy, whimsically connecting and incorporating the parallel universes which are given birth by generations of accumulation. Images: courtesy of the Artist and Queens Museum of Art
For the full episodes of 69 Favor Taste, visit 69favortaste.com. |
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