PREVIEW Foam Magazine #63: FOOD!

PETER

PUKLUS

Confession

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

A few years ago, during one of his sporadic visits before his death, my father gave me a small, black plastic bag. It was one of those bags used to protect photosensitive paper, made of extremely thick, light blocking black plastic material. It contained ‘The Pictures’. The Pictures, as he would refer to them, were a group of about fifty photographs, mostly cartedevisiteand cabinet cards printed on rather thick and fancy cotton paper which he had gathered and kept over the years — what we could call a family archive.

These were photographs coming from his side of the family, dating back to the 1930s, and up to the moment he was about twenty. His own personal batch, his life really, with himself being either the subject or the photographer. He never felt the urge to organise them in any sort of way just kept them chaotically in a plastic bag, to protect them form daylight. There are pictures of ancestors and relatives, his childhood (very few), and gatherings. A few of them show him smiling. Over time I framed some, partially to keep them close but visible, and partially to expose my kids to the presence of ancestors they have never met — pictures to be adorned with candles, flowers and sweets on the night of 31 October. But it was only during the making of the issue of Foam Magazine you are currently holding in your hands that I realised the ones I framed are the only ones where people are eating. This is not particularly surprising, given my family’s whereabouts: I come from

Myriad of Things And Bodies

Myriad of Things And Bodies

Within the spectrum of contemporary photographic practices, the act of using food as objects re-appears in many shapes and forms. British photographer Martin Parr for example travels the world year after year, pointing his camera’s flashgun at the social complexities and consumerism behind food while revealing different food cultures. Italian artist Lorenzo Vitturi’s Dalston Anatomy is set in the immigrant and multicultural London borough of Dalston, staging organic materials from the market as a playful response to the rich colours and cultures of his local environment.

While the above two works focus on the consumer role played by food in the context of globalisation, the food that appears through the lenses of photographers such as Stephen Shore, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Rinko Kawauchi makes the viewer rethink the ordinary beauty of everyday objects. At the same time, the food reassembled and

rearranged by the photographers breaks the viewer’s perception of food as a natural gift/artefact and dramatically enriches our visual imagination. However, when it comes to Chinese photographer Lin Zhipeng’s images of food, none of the abovementioned categories match his context.

Half-gnawed strawberries and grapes scattered around a wet bedsheet, around the messy hair of a half-naked sitter. Colourful vegetables and fruits squeezed inside a girl’s fishnet stockings create bumps across her lower body; juicy pomegranate seeds placed on the private parts of two girls forming a playful shape of pubic hair. The fresh, natural food and the often-naked sitters have become recurring part of Lin’s motifs, and remind me of an old saying from Mencius: Appetite and lust are only natural.

Looking through Lin’s WeChat posts, it is not difficult to spot his love for food, whether it is his daily cooking posts or us-

ing food in his works. In addition to being a photographer, he is also recognised as a gourmet in his circles. Raised in Guangzhou province, Lin is a native of Shantou, where one can immerse in the beauty of Teochew culture. Teochew food is considered the ‘Lonely Island of Chinese Cuisine’, as mentioned in a documentary series titled Flavorful Origins. It states that, ‘those who have not been to Teochew must not call themselves gourmets because from fish sashimi to fatty wine, there is a legacy of food culture from the Qin Dynasty to the Song Dynasty’.

Growing up in the humid streets of Shantou, it is easy to understand the vital role food plays in Lin’s colourful photographs. Lin utilises the following strategies in his photographs: borrowing the shapes of natural foods to represent human organs, such as mushrooms, bananas, figs, etc. to discuss the relationship between natural

objects and gender, using the interaction between the sitter and the food to add an exotic element to the photograph, and setting food as an ornament in the image to engage or challenge the viewer’s visual experience.

In 2019, Akio Nagasawa Gallery Aoyama exhibited Lin’s Flower and Fruits series. The exhibition included seventy prints with flowers and fruits, repetitively showing his love and passion for appetite and lust, ranging from his early works to more recent ones. The juxtaposition of images portrays a young generation which indulges in love and life, oscillating between jubilation and deep melancholy, playful sexuality, and often just the simple human need to be loved in an otherwise indifferent and ever-changing society.

Although Lin has published two books Sour Strawberries (Editions Bessard, 2018) and Flower and Fruits (T&M Projects, 2019) dedicated to his visual language, one can imagine a future A to Z cookbook in which Lin’s photographs appear in alphabetical order according to the food on the page. It leads the viewer to reacquaint themselves with the photographer and his love for food. To conclude, for Lin Zhipeng, taking photos is as normal as having three meals a day since ‘appetite and lust are only natural’.

All images from the series Myriad of Things And Bodies © Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223), courtesy of the artist

LIN ZHIPENG (aka No.223) is a photographer and freelancer writer based in Beijing. Created in 2003, his blog ‘North Latitude 23’ where he published everyday pictures accompanied by short texts received millions views and made him famous among the web community. Presented for ten years in group exhibitions in China and abroad, Lin’s works have also been the object of several solo shows both nationally and internationally (Delaware Contemporary Museum; Walther Collection Ulm inbetween Gallery Paris; De Sarthe Gallery Beijing ; Stieglitz19 Gallery Antwerp ; M97 Gallery Shanghai, etc).

He has published photography books in China, France, Canada, Japan and Italy.

YINING HE is a Chinese curator and researcher in visual arts. In curatorial practices, she specialises in uncovering contemporary visual arts practices and weaving them within a dual vision of politics and visual culture. From an academic perspective, Yining has written, edited, and participated in numerous books, including the Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation and Social Justice (Routledge, 2023) and A World History of Women Photographers (Thames & Hudson, 2022), amongst others. She is the editor of Floating Island: Journal of Photography and Visual Culture (est. 2016), and she served as a member of the peer review panel of OVER Journal. Yining is based between the UK and China.

FLORIAN MAAS

The Meat Paradox

Farming; Food; Workers; (Pig); Dog; Table; Sitting; (Eating); Happiness; Harmony. Berlin-based photographer Florian Maas plugs his keywords some set between brackets for heightened emphasis into Stable Diffusion, a deep learning, textto-image AI tool. If the words above offer raw ingredients for a pretty unappetising visual soup, Stable Diffusion might well be the supercharged pressure cooker. At dizzying speed, recipes of inputted terms conjure new and unsettling images, informed by unimaginably vast databases of existing ones.

In recent years, manifestations of AI have increasingly assumed centre stage in many artists’ creative practices, as useful tools or as subject matter, taken up and pulled apart with equal vigour. Across the board, there’s a sense that this technology’s revolutionary potential is light years from realisation. But beneath all the awe-inspiring sophistication, Maas’ own trials with Stable Diffusion soon exposed a glaring pitfall: AI tools are themselves socialised much like humans. Thus, if certain images are scarcely produced, limited in their distribution or if they never existed, to begin with how can they inform the image generator’s output?

The Meat Paradox

A vegan for the past decade, Maas conceived his project, The Meat Paradox, to dissect the hypocrisies of animal consumption in no uncertain terms. Though in devolving creative authority to his AI tool, the resultant images initially lacked the desired gut punch, falling short of the artist’s own grotesque impression of meat manufacturing. Keywords like ‘farming’ more frequently conjured portrayals of healthy cattle grazing verdant pastures under sweeping blue skies than anything disquieting, as if to avert our gaze from reality once more. These dominant images, deployed across the food industry to validate our consumption habits, displace uglier truths. Depictions of animals enduring cramped and squalid conditions, knee-deep in their own excrement, were nowhere to be seen. Neither was the grim act of slaughter.

For Maas, producing the hard-hitting work he envisaged meant addressing this imbalance which in turn meant ‘feeding’ further images into Stable Diffusion, supplementing those the AI had already ‘seen’ from open-source databases like Pinterest or Flickr. ‘It’s a case of summoning pictures’, Maas muses of his somewhat curatorial approach to image-making. In

the same way that particular words could be emphasised in shaping the generator’s visual outcomes, so too could photographs. Warts-and-all shots of industrial farming practices were introduced, such as those taken undercover by activist groups like We Animals, offering Maas’ macabre series an added dose of uncomfortable realism.

Ultimately, the AI-born images that make up the project subjected only to some light retouching feel anything but real. They’re too ghastly, too gruesome… aren’t they? Some thrust us in amongst the tightly packed livestock, their bodies battling various states of decay or butchery, presided over by the eerie smiles of computer-rendered workers. Others merge the conventionally segregated phases of the food supply chain; meat and its sentient sources surround each other throughout. One image finds a man in the belly of a dimly lit abattoir, where slabs of unwrapped flesh fill a shopping trolley a far cry from sanitised supermarket worlds of polythene packaging and elevator music.

The recurring inclusion of man’s best friend is another of the project’s constants. Where one image shows a kind of hybrid pig-dog, another nestles three hounds be-

tween their adoring human owners all of whom appear visibly reassured by the close proximity of hunks of steak. Such images convey Maas’ reflections on Carnism the prevalent but perplexing practice of designating certain species for companionship, and condemning others to our casseroles. References, meanwhile, to the environmental toll of meat consumption barely feature at all. It is perhaps a surprising omission, but as the climate crisis envelops us ever further, and as our leaders continue to sit on their hands, it might simply have been too futile an angle.

When I met Maas in Berlin, we unpacked his work over dinner at a (vegan) Korean restaurant where lookalike eggs crown bibimbaps, complete with runny plant-based yolks. Our conversation covers cognitive dissonance; ground-breaking legislation in the Dutch city of Haarlem, where advertisements of meat products are now prohibited; the future of sustainable food, from insects to tempeh to labgrown meat; and the recent farce of Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh COP27, where guest delegates arriving in their droves by private jet were reportedly fed a meat-fuelled menu, a paradox Maas compares to ‘handing out cigarettes at a lung cancer convention’.

FLORIAN MAAS

Whilst few could question the many merits of Maas’ admirable lifestyle, my doubts persist as to the practical function of his disturbing images. Do stomach-churning shock tactics ever truly inspire us to alter our ways? But thinking of the project as Maas’ sole soapbox is probably misguided it is instead just one piece in a puzzle of activities, all orbiting a central cause. It lives alongside online activism, volunteer work at an animal sanctuary, and commercial assignments for vegan fashion brands with his long-term photographic collaborator, Aglaja Brix. On the prospect of inciting change, Maas is realistic: ‘I don’t think my practice alone will make a massive difference, but when many people commit to the same cause, I do believe change is possible. I’ve already had an impact on many friends. For me, that’s what matters it’s about that ripple effect’.

All images from the series The Meat Paradox © Florian Maas, courtesy of the artist

FLORIAN MAAS is a Berlin-based photographer and artist whose work is characterised by Bauhaus aesthetics, graphical lines, and geometric shapes. He is best known for his fashion photography, but equally inspired by shooting nature, architecture, and cities. Driven by intuition and ethics, Florian captures the world from unseen, surprising and sometimes ambiguous perspectives, while also always trying to utilise his creativity to provoke discussion about social issues like animal liberation.

GEORGE H. KING is an independent writer and editor based in Amsterdam. His work focuses on intersections between contemporary photography, culture and society. A graduate of Liberal Arts & Sciences from University College Utrecht, George previously worked as editor-in-chief of Unseen Magazine. Among others, his writing has featured in the British Journal of Photography, GUP Magazine, Yet Magazine and Trigger.

Asia Bistro

NHÀ SÀN COLLECTIVE

& THE QUEER HOUSE

NHÀ

& THE QUEER HOUSE

Nhà Sàn Studio (NSS) was founded in 1998 by artists Nguyễn Mạnh Đức and Trần Lương.

It considered the first and longest running nonprofit experimental art space in Vietnam. The collective nurtured several generations of the most imaginative and daring contemporary artists in the country until 2011. Following the spirit of artistic creativity and freedom, a group of younger artists formed Nhà Sàn Collective in 2013, aiming to support each other in pushing the boundaries of expression in Vietnam as well as nurturing the community. Most recently the collective participated in the documenta 15 in Kassel, for which the collective invited visitors to create a garden with migratory plants and storytelling, enjoy each-others company in a queer house with an open kitchen, screenings and discussions. We are grateful that Nhà Sàn agreed to curate the following pages with the ingredients and recipes of their ‘cooking’.

Milkteeth and ladybirds

Johan van der Keuken

Achter Glas, 1957 © Johan van der Keuken 35,5 x 29,5 cm, Edition of 100, €295,00

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