Alison Kuo

Commissioned for the Think!Chinatown Lantern Artist Residency

Think!Chinatown

My performance The New Joys of Gellies was derived from my research on gelatin in the United States, from its early use in wartime rationing, to its emergence as a colorful object of desire, and arriving at its present-day inedible counterpart, slime: a goopy, stretchy mixture of glue and household chemicals like borax, baking soda, and contact solution that is often colored with dyes and glitter. It engaged notions of sacrifice, sensuality, and aspiration contained in the material properties and social history of gelatin in the United States in a series of fleshy, squishy gelatin action-vignettes.

Taking an operational cue from slime videos that circulate ubiquitously online, in The New Joys of Gellies I approach gelatin as an object of desire, caressing, kneading, prodding it, and experimenting with its material properties through touch. I commissioned my collaborator Williamson Brasfield to create a live musical composition for the piece, using sampled audio from the making and touching of the gelatin to merge the aesthetics of ASMR and experimental sound art. Imposing ephemeral destruction as one would with ever-expendable slime, I propeled my body into the rendered bodies of anonymous animals that transform from powder back into sinews and cartilage with the addition of hot water and kinetic energy.

Happy Family Night Market at 99 Scott, Brooklyn. July, 2018. Fabricated in collaboration with Print All Over Me and researched with the assistance of independent curator Media Farzin. Install photos by Janice Chung.

Chinese Cooking the American Way is a series of printed collage works on fabric that look at a specific slice of North American cooking culture: Chinese cookbooks printed for Western audiences in the second half of the twentieth century.

The project’s first installment is a large tent and lounge area designed for the first Happy Family Night Market in Bushwick. The collages hanging from the tent encourage visitors to think about how cookbooks provide us with many different entry points into food and culture.

The images and texts are drawn from vintage cookbooks published between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, partly drawn from my family’s collection. Some are part of the era’s marketing of exotic cuisines (from the 1963 Meals with an Oriental Flair: “a breeze to eat with chopsticks, if have the yen!”), while others, like the 1968 Cooking of China, take a more educational look at the ingredients, traditions, and festivals of “the world’s oldest civilization.”

Lehman College Gallery, Bronx, NY. Photos by Williamson Brasfield.

Performance for TIMESHARE. September, 2017.

Pedestrians on 10th Avenue haven't had to worry about death by freight train for over 75 years, but before that getting food to New Yorkers' tables meant that dozens of people, many of them children, were killed annually on the street-level tracks that once ran through the West Side. Cattle to the meat packer, oranges to the market, milk, vegetables. Nourishment for an alive city with a visceral dash of collateral damage was the norm.

In Bone Bath I cast my body in gelatin for three hours in the bathtub of apartment 26 in Zaha Hadid's posthumously completed residential building on 520 W28th street, overlooking the Highline and former Death Avenue. Williamson Brasfield was shower playing an original live score in a tribute to the West Side Cowboys who for years rode in front of trains on 10th Avenue to warn people of their approach.

A performance for Motel Gallery in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn.

Young at Art Museum, Davie, FL. Photos by Williamson Brasfield.

Paraiso Bajo in Bogotá, Colombia, 2016. Photos by Williamson Brasfield.

Performance at 184 Project Space in Brooklyn for the exhibition “MIS”. And at the Knockdown Center as a part of the “Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime Performance Series”. September 2017.

In August of 2017 I attended my paternal grandmother’s funeral in Hong Kong. Among the personal items of hers that I inherited was her treasured Peking Opera beard. My cousin instructed me on its care and in turn I asked others to witness and help me make sense of this new ritual.

Exhibited at the National Academy of Design during “How-To” a weekend of workshops and performances presented by BompPop!Up and David Humphrey. Manhattan, June 2018. Photo series and workshop “How to Roll a Peach Across the Floor.”