Review- Food of Love/Yum Cha Conversations- Polly Snaith
10-9-12
By: Janice Im
As the lift doors to the Pao Galleries opened, a smiling woman rushed to greet me.
“Hello!” She hastily wiped her clay-streaked hands, and then shook my hand. She had been sitting at a table in the lobby making clay “dim sum’, and I was her first visitor. “The main area is in the back. Why don’t you follow me?” Had the ‘performance’ already started?
Polly Snaith is ethnically Chinese, but was adopted and raised in the UK. Several years ago, she finally reunited with her long-lost birth mother, and the experience of meeting and getting re-acquainted with her informs the staged happening “Being a Stranger at My Table”, the main part of the exhibition. In this participatory performance, the audience becomes the actors themselves.
Back in 2010, Polly had invited her birth mother to stay with her for a month. Not knowing each other well, the relationship developed amidst a backdrop of domestic activities, chiefly the planning, preparing and sharing of food. In “Being a Stranger at My Table”, Polly places the audience in her shoes by recreating her home environment in the Pao Galleries. What does it feel like to be a stranger entering an intimate, domestic environment? How does one handle a “complex psychological situation” where things seem “welcoming yet foreign”?
The setup in the gallery includes a shoe rack, pin board, table, and chairs, and they all come from Polly’s actual home. Yellow tape highlights the threshold that audiences step over to enter. I obediently took off my shoes. On one wall, there is a Recipe Log that details the dishes that her birth mother has made her or taught her to make. Once inside the space, participants can choose to sit down and ‘feed’ the English fruit cake (make small holes in the cake and spoon in a few teaspoons of rum), grate turnip for Lo Bak Go (Chinese turnip cake), or make dough/jam/mint sauce. At any moment in the happening, you can chat with Polly, who may be doing the same chores as you are. While taking part in the ‘performance’, Polly hopes that audience members will have a chance to undergo an “emotional shift”, that they will be able to stop and reflect upon their own history with food, and how that ties in with their experience of nurture and human relationships.
While I was there, I was by myself, so for better or worse did not get a sense that I was ‘performing’ for someone. Polly, as leader/facilitator in the staged happening, also did not appear to be playing a role - she spoke and acted like her normal everyday self. In fact, most of the time I felt like I was hanging out with an acquaintance in her kitchen/living room, which may be exactly her point. I highly recommend not being shy and taking part in an action (eg. ‘feeding’ the cake), as this is the best way to experience the happening as the artist intended. For example, it was not until I actually sat down to grate turnips that I started thinking about how my grandmother would use to make Lo Bak Go for Chinese New Year every year, and how she is unable to do so any more due to bad eyesight. Quite suddenly, I was overcome with a wave of nostalgia. Perhaps this was the ‘emotional shift’ that Polly was talking about.
Go on and stop by the 5th floor Pao Galleries sometime in the next two weeks. You will find yourself pleasantly surprised. You may even end up picking up a new skill, like turnip grating.
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22 August 2017