he yifan

几碗Bowls of rice (2019)米饭

participatory performance with objects; table, table cloth, chairs, specially made ceramic bowls and cooked rice

Bowls of rice invites participators to sit around a table and consume rice out of specially made bowls following the instructions printed on the tracing paper: Please have a seat and finish this bowl of rice without having conversations or making eye-contacts with one another. The rice is cooked with butter and salt in the rice cooker. The bowls participators have to eat from have texts written inside. The text reveals itself throughout the process of rice being consumed. The texts are abstracted from my journals that draws up an analogy between digestion problem and forgotten nightmares.

A quote from the text written on the bowl:

““How to describe the nightmares I have forgotten… It is as if the mind had trouble digesting some facts, happenings, words, conditions or people encountered, they have to be hiccupped to the consciousness with a hint of soured taste… I can never reach my finger to the food that I’ve swallowed. I cannot grab a mop and some soap to go into my belly to do a thorough cleaning up. Once they are in there, they are in there. That is how trivially desperate I am towards the thoughts and memories in my head. I could not just get rid of them.””