Interrupted Meals

HOW Art Museum (Shanghai) is pleased to announce that the new group exhibition Interrupted Meals will be on view from August 8, 2020.

The title of the exhibition Interrupted Meals comes from the book The Parasite, written by the French philosopher Michel Serres. In the book Serres sees human history as the parasitic history of a relationship between humanity and nature as well as humans themselves. Serres provides us with a critique of anthropocentrism and the system of technological production its conceptual framework is based on. As the first group exhibition at HOW Art Museum since the outbreak of COVID-19, the exhibition attempts to re-examine the relationship between humanity and nature, reflecting on the crisis surrounding the existing systems of production and connection during this "interrupted" period in time. 

But when we talk about "the relationship between humans and nature", it is immediately apparent that the phrase itself is problematic, namely: Are humans part of nature? Is nature still what we think it is today? The necessity of the first question can well be understood in terms of a hypothetical answer to the second question. If human beings were part of nature, the binary construction of humanity and nature referred to for the question itself would no longer hold. Instead, the long history of unrestricted human intervention in nature and the arbitrary construction of nature have led to a particular relationship between humans and nature that is different from the relationship between other species and nature. Here we can refer to what Serres states in The Parasite:

"History hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his favor when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his kind, he continues to do so; he wants to be the parasite of man as well. And his kind want to be so too." (Serres, 1980)

Human intervention in nature has always been consistent with the logic of its own development. As such if we are to discuss the relationship between the two, we must first return to the discussion regarding systems that were invented by humans. Secondly, we must also ask questions of nature put forth with such a proposition: Is nature merely the object of instrumentalization which lacks any kind of subjectivity and requires humanity to protect it from climate change, pollution and extinction of species? It is not difficult to imagine especially in today's crisis-ridden world, a nature that would survive the extinction of the human species: a system capable of sustaining itself organically by regulating its own form and composition, yet we rarely learn from it.

Therefore, the nature discussed in this exhibition is neither separate nor opposed to the concept(s) of human/artificial, nor is it held hostage to vague and empty rhetoric compiled into a variety of arrogant grand narratives. Instead, it is a multitude of specific and sometimes minuscule objects with connections that collectively make up a self-sufficient subject. In the exhibition, this collection and subject are reified into "food", embodying that which is simultaneously situated in the categories of human culture and ecosystem and human culture and social institution.

Food serves as the material basis for the survival and reproduction of humanity as well as all living beings, which together used to form a self-sufficient ecosystem. It was also the most intimate form of interaction between humans and nature that transformed the entire ecosystem into a form of daily life that brought people together through cooking, sharing and digestion. If we examine the history of food and its networks such as the ways of cooking, it is apparent that the history of mankind is entangled with nature, a history filled with stories of progress, achievement and the heritage, while on the reverse side it is a history filled with hunger, theft and murder. As Levi-Strauss points out in Mythologiques: The Origin of Table Manners: 

"We can hope to discover how, in any particular society, cooking is a language through which that society unconsciously reveals its structure." (Levi-Strauss, 1968)

Since the industrialization of production, acquisition and digestion of food has gradually shifted away from the ecosystem that once connected all living things, and transformed into a spectacle of consumption and production both sophisticated in appearance and colossal in scale. They also play a significant role in the evolution of industrialization, colonial history, and globalization. Food has become an isolated unit of production, consumption, and desire in the capitalist system, and thus it hints at the fate of humanity itself. The exhibition Interrupted Meals is therefore a dynamic site for reflecting on food and the natural and social references that it connects.

It is noteworthy that the food in the works of the exhibition does not exist as a "medium" for art production or a "third party" that bridges the gap between art and the public, but rather as a collection of subjects that point to "a set of relations whose network unifies the whole earth" (Serres, 1990), which is itself an intervention and interruption of the existing systems of production and attempts to suggest the possibility of alternative connections and symbiosis.