這位電影製作人兼藝術家的個展正分成兩個部分在曼谷展出

Max Crosbie-Jones

Apichatpong Weerasethakul 談論他參選奧斯卡金像獎的影片，以及如何在極權下創作

Food writer, cook, and domestic goddess Nigella Lawson argues passionately for the decoupling of guilt from pleasure. For her, there are no ‘guilty pleasures’ in eating. Hunger is a sensation of want and&nbsp;eating satiates a longing for a lost feeling or faraway memory she describes as a ‘rhapsodic paradise’ that strikes deeper than mere necessity. This poetic understanding of eating comes from a specific bourgeois fantasy –&nbsp;for many, it is simply a matter of survival. Yet to borrow from Nigella, it could also embody the hope for – or the memory of – a different, more materially abundant life.Nigella can only speak through the prism of her own class (which she recognizes). But let us sit with her idea a while longer. We could take from it that we should indulge whatever hedonism we so desire. But what are the ethics of Epicureanism? In Jonny Negron’s painting Mukbang (2021), a woman in an emerald-colored top is seated against a sky-blue backdrop, hazy clouds floating behind her. She is before a table with a mound of bright red crawfish flecked with corn the color of faded gold – a Louisiana dish presented as a still life. She raises a hand to the corner of her mouth, pinky erect, with nails lacquered a reddish-brown like that of&nbsp;liver. A single shellfish is passing through her claret lips. On the right side of the composition rests half a lemon and a soda cup. Her manner is blasé. She engages us with a gaze so bored and quotidian&nbsp;it reminds me of Manet’s bartender in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).

The title of the work suggests that Negron imagines us watching her eat. Mukbang – a portmanteau of the Korean words for ‘eating’ and ‘broadcast’ – is the phenomenon of watching people consume (oftentimes) excessively large meals as a kind of durational performance. There is always a video feed, sometimes live, sometimes not, sometimes with talking, slurping, chewing, huffing, sniffling, choking, moaning. Diegetic sounds are an essential part of the performance.Mukbang satisfies a market for abject pleasure, and like any kind of pleasure the market is inexhaustible. There’s an element of pornography, too: a performer satisfies their audience through their own simulation of self-pleasure. Unsurprisingly then, the most successful genre of mukbang is that of petite young women eating quantities large enough for small armies (videos of the YouTuber&nbsp;‘tzuyang’&nbsp;eating 112 plates of sushi, 5.5 kilograms of noodle soup, or 8 kilograms of crab, have each clocked over 10 million views). In these videos, food becomes no more than a thing to be conquered. Because a mukbang fails if the meal is not finished, the horizon of failure looms before the first bite. It is a conditional kind of pleasure we are bearing witness to – a clean plate becomes akin to an orgasm.

Harris’ original montage was a composition of hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings, many of them sourced from his 2001 photographic essay on racism in Italian soccer for The New York Times Magazine (Harris previously worked as a magazine photographer), interspersed with pictures of the artist’s own earlier works and artworks from the canon, such as Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866). Between underwear ads, a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6731/Jean-Michel-Basquiat">Basquiat&nbsp;</a>painting, and a McDonald’s french fries container, these elements are joined mostly in incongruity, though seen through Harris’ eye for gendered and racial subtexts: how everyone in a stadium audience is white, for instance, and if soccer resembles bullfighting, with the players more bulls than matadors.The dense network of content is organized around a striking centerpiece: an Adidas ad showing a young Black man giving French soccer player Zinedine Zidane a pedicure. Harris had come across this picture in another experience of frisson a few years earlier, when he recognized in it an uncanny resemblance to Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia (1863) of a Black female servant receding into the background of a portrait of a naked white woman. The ad contains the same element of fetishization, though here of white masculinity, accompanied by an unthinking exhibition of racial disparity. In Harris’ Ready-Made (2001) and several other works this image is punctuated with yellow jets of dried semen – always emphasizing and complicating the tensions of racial difference and sexual sameness barely disguised in the original.&nbsp;

Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung is a writer, critic, and founding editor of Decolonial Hacker. In 2021, he won the International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC).Jonny Negron's work will be on view in the Art Basel Discoveries sector. He is represented by <a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/3041/Ch%C3%A2teau-Shatto" style="font-weight: bold;">Château Shatto</a>, Los Angeles.

title_style_3

The Zimbabwean artist draws power from women’s resilience, and their magic

Stories

How I became an artist: Kresiah Mukwazhi

Trained in miniature manuscript painting, the artist has made a labor-intensive genre her own

Deconstructing tradition: the radical feminism of Shahzia Sikander

The artist's new Tate Britain Commission is a blazingly ambitious cavalcade of humanity, melding past and present, joy and pain

How Hew Locke's sculpture questions the history of global trade

In the painter’s work, performative eating is all but pornographic, writes Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung

Welcome,

Discover more related content below: