Joshua Lue Chee Kong

In Between Here and There

Resin Cast Bottles with Various Ingredients

“In addition to the dried Chinese ingredients, I also included preserved snacks andsweets that were brought to me from my parent’s grocery Wang Li and Sons’ Supermarketin Trinidad. Within these resin bottles, you will find Chinese red mango, preserved redpeaches, Haw Flakes and preserved prunes (Fig. 27). Each bottle contains snacks that arememories from my childhood and my connection to my home, in my case, the Chinese Shop(see Being and Belonging Behind the Shop Counter). Like my earlier experiments of usinghome-cooked foods, the preserved red mango and red peaches left voids as they shrank.The snacks, like the home-cooked food, displayed acts of resistance against my attempts topreserve their physical shape as if to communicate that they should be remembered throughthe act of eating. The use of food as metaphors also brings focus to aspects of absence.Through food and the use of sensory memory, home becomes closer. Similarly, when the body becomes absent through death, memory allows for the person to continue livingwithin the memory. ”