cooking with park chan kook

The other day we had a lovely afternoon inventing new delicacies with artist Park Chan Kook, a Korean artist whose social practice often involves inviting local people to make a meal together using improvised ingredients and tools. Each participant brought an ingredient: a bunch of bananas, a big jar of miso, a bottle of rice wine vinegar, or several bunches of greens... and then we all worked together to make the meal. It really highlighted the differences between Korean and Japanese cooking and eating styles - whereas Koreans are very comfortable with big, shared meals and experimental dishes, the Japanese typically stick to specific traditional recipes... and shared food (especially food that everyone has been touching) is a little bit squeamish-making for people here.

Still, it was a pretty good time for all, involving a lot of giggling over what to roll up in the Vietnamese spring roll wrappers and Chan's bananas fried directly on the portable burner... and some interesting jellyfish sightings in the water next to the food prep area. Since most of the "cooks" involved were artists-in-residence at BankART, our collective meal wound up being quite a lovely spread, even if not all of it was eaten.

lost and found

In many locales it's common enough to see a lost mitten or other small item placed on a fencepost for the owner to reclaim.

In Tokyo this kind gesture is taken a step or two further: find a protective plastic bag, some packing tape, a scrap of paper and a marker to make a handmade sign reading " LOST ITEM," then post your package near where said item was found. The child's shoe here was found hung on a residential street near Nippori station. Sadly a week or so after this photo was taken and the owner had not yet returned for it. Anyone missing a little pink shoe?

Also lost/found in this neighborhood were a frilly black broken parasol carefully draped over a rail, and a tiny sock with cherries printed on it, perched on a tree branch.

roof party

If you were to pass by our stairwell the other night, you'd know there was a party going on because of all the shoes piled outside the door. To celebrate all of our public artist lectures and also to make use of the excellent little roof garden attached to Nakamura-san's otherwise tiny little top-floor apartment, the artists in our apartment building (there are four of us) decided to throw a little party for our friends and fellow artists at BankART. We all trailed home, stopped at the 100-yen Lawson's for edamame crisps, gooey dango, and various types of booze, and climbed the four flights of stairs into the starry night. It was a really lovely evening filled with interesting conversation, sometimes incorporating three or more languages and involving a lot of animated gesturing and liberal use of digital pocket language dictionaries.

Thanks to Andy for taking these great photos with the digital SLR. My little compact couldn't handle the darkness, so I focused my attention on the food and giggling attempts at communication.

artists talk!

Yesterday Andy and I gave a public talk at BankART on the themes and connections between our work, both individual and collaborative - generally focusing around themes of communication, the body and nature... particularly the river that flows outside our window and through Yokohama.

I think people weren't quite sure what to make of it all - Andy's work (below) is often punny and playful, though he speaks about it in a very conceptual way .. and my work seems to be really scary to most people here -especially the long black hair- though the way I talk about it tends to be a little less serious. It's all very much in-progress, but it was a good chance to start making clearer connections between some of the disparate things we've been working on here. A few images from the talk are posted here.