I don’t actually consider what I do as an inventive follow. There’re no boundaries or limits. All of the methods I fill a day — even when I’m doing nothing in any respect — are one and the identical. I don’t have a studio. I don’t get up and go to a spot the place I sit down and make issues. I simply do what I would like or wish to do, and all through that course of, I take into consideration numerous doable works. Every part informs every thing else.
For the previous six years or so, I’ve taught a category at Columbia College referred to as Making With out Objects. Technically, it’s a sophisticated undergraduate sculpture course, however we don’t actually produce something. I’m all the time taking a look at what’s happening on this planet at massive and making an attempt to think about how a younger artist would possibly expertise that. The scholars have made movies for YouTube. We’ve performed tasks on Instagram. As soon as, I rented a plot of land within the digital actuality sport Second Life and had everybody construct a sculpture there. I encourage the scholars to assume conceptually and create issues of their heads greater than in any materials sense. Actually, the identify of the category ought to’ve been How To not Do Something, however the college stated it sounded counter to the thought of going to school.
Meals has featured loads in my work — I virtually grew up in my grandmother’s kitchen in Thailand — so, for a number of years, I performed the category within the kitchen of the gallerist Gavin Brown’s home in Harlem. On this photograph, I’m educating my college students at his former exhibition area on West 127th Road, which closed in 2020, in a kitchen he constructed partly for this objective. Yearly I present the category learn how to make a number of recipes, and right here we’re cooking pad Thai, a noodle dish and in addition the identify of a chunk of mine from 1990 wherein I served meals to guests on the Paula Allen Gallery in New York.
As I combined the sauce and stir-fried the noodles, I defined to the scholars all of the totally different parts that went into that work — the assorted influences and layers that would simply be missed. For instance, I used an electrical wok for the unique piece as a result of I’d seen one in a video by the artist Martha Rosler and took that as an inspiration. And the meal was primarily based on a recipe from an American girl, within the ’70s or early ’80s, who substituted ketchup for tamarind paste as a result of pad Thai wasn’t well-known in america on the time. Once I made the work, I used to be actually excited by providing a postcolonial critique. There’s a strategy within the West of isolating objects from different cultures, of placing them in packing containers in museums and learning them outdoors of their context, which, for me, fully misses the purpose. In distinction, having fun with a meal is a solution to actually interact with and perceive the opposite, to share time and area and sustenance. At present, I don’t draw a line between the cooking I do for a piece and the meals preparation I do at house to feed my associate and me. Cooking, making work and educating are all simply dwelling.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
