mother brine

mother brine

food installation + intervention

Exhibition: Within Our Bodies - 2023

Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz - berlin DE

Similar in its conceptualization to mother dough, mother vinegar, mother water, and mother liquor, Mother Brine references the culinary anthropological practice of preserving food by chemical processes of fermentation (of bacterium), distillation (of liquors), curing (of meats), and crystallization (of sugars). 

Mother Brine draws on “the continuous recycle of a portion of the mother solution from one batch into subsequent batches in which an increased product yield is expected, and also leads to an accumulation of impurities.” (Keshavarz*, American Chemical Society).

These chemical processes of preservation and recycling, resulting in an increase in both yield and impurities, I saw represented in kimchi as a metaphor for the complexities of diasporic identity of Korean foreign adoptees.

In many ways this is personal. A self-portrait. A tautology. When my hands dried from the salt. When my eyes burnt from the spice. Bittersweet. Fermented in brine. I tasted the sea by the city that birthed me. One I’ve never seen. 

My mother’s Cesarean section was painful. So painful she decided to never hold me. I made this red kimchi for her, as I’ve made every hour of every day, in memory.

Because perhaps I missed something, being so but not. Korean and American displaced yet belonging somehow. Where I jested. And jest now. 

Let’s eat together and think of her.