doraji, ginger, ginseng and others at Namdaemun Market

our guide, SungChoon

various dishes on display

sesame, ginger, doraji, gochu garu, sesame leaves, and more.

On the way home, we stopped at Lotte Mart, to get a sense of how the big supermarket compares to the street market.  Pretty much all of the same things were available, and the prices didn't seem too much different.  In the end, shopping is shopping - the market is touristy and the super market, isn't really super at all, just indoors & warmer.

Later, we attempted to cook some of our new ingredients, with some success.  The Korean 'dates' or jube jubes were quite tasty with sweet potatoes.  We've also been cooking a lot with gochu garu, or toasted red chili powder. They add a certain warmth to dishes, without really being too spicy.  At Lotte Mart, we found long strips of the chilis and used them in the test kitchen.  Their colour balances the look of the dish, and the texture makes for a subltle flavouring.  

radical voku | test kitchen #2 from the memelab on Vimeo.

Cooking hotteok with Mannam chefs

Over the past several weeks, we've been trying to gather lots of knowledge about Korean cooking - even though ultimately our research isn't concerned so much with traditional recipes - we're very interested in sourcing local foods and understanding local cuisine. So far, we've made hotteok with the Mannam Volunteer Association, kimchi at O'ngo Food Communication, and root vegetables with Yoonseo Lee.

hotteok

Mannam Association is a welcoming place interested in promoting cultural sharing and volunteerism.  They offer regular classes, and we happened to visit the hotteok class. Hotteok are a kind of pancake, often served as street food, and are mostly delicious - if a little greasy.  The people in the class were friendly, most of them were on a big week-off from English teaching (winter holidays).  The hosts were also really nice - but unfortunately they taught us to cook the pancakes from a box mix, which was a bit of disappointment.  It would have been better to work from scratch.  However, we got to use the round pancake presser tool, which was quite a bit of fun. 

At O'ngo Food Communications we were lucky enough to come on slow day (Monday morning) and received a private class with the very knowlegable director, Jia.  She actually has a PhD in food and culture, and is a trained chef. We had some interesting conversations, as she made an adapted version of kimchi (vegan) with me.

Everyone says that kimchi is hard to make - but it seems that they're referring to the time and mess involved, not the actual difficulty of preparation. The napa cabbage has to be soaked in salt water for about 12 hours and then mixed with a spice concoction (chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sugar). Mixing the cabbage and spices does have a certain method and if you're making a lot (often the case here) it would get quite messy. But it's worth it: we've already finished our batch, and are gearing-up to make some on our own.

One interesting thing we spoke about was the symbolic differences of food plating between the East and West. Western food is often served on individual plates - a single-plate-per-person system.  While at the Korean table there are many small dishes and each person can mix and match as they please. The meal is both shared, with common foods consumed, but in a manner that allows each individual to construct their own meal. This is definitely an inspiration for the co-cooking events we're developing.

Yoonseo cooking lotus steaks

Last Saturday, Yoonseo Lee taught us to make root vegetables the macrobiotic way.  It was an inspiring class, with some useful knowledge - interesting tips on cooking rice and making a sea salt / sesame seed garnish were helpful.  As well, learning how to cook burdock and lotus was really good.  These vegetables are of special interest to us, and now we know that lotus is supposed to be a bit crunchy even after cooking... we were worried we were doing it wrong! :-) 

The simplicity of cooking seasonal whole foods with straight-forward preparation is an appealing aspect to macro cooking.  As well, it's an approach that ultimately takes the energetic qualties of food seriously, even down to the types of surfaces and utensils used, in addition to the angle at which the food is sliced. This opens up the meaning of food and it's preparation in a direction that allows for metaphor and sensory association beyond dry nutritional science.  Yin and Yang ... 

brown rice, lotus steak, carrot and burdock panfry

Nationally, Koreans seem very proud of their cuisine, and rightly so. Internationaly, it often gets overshadowed by Japanese and Chinese cuisine, at least in terms of gloablized exports to the west. We think that perhaps because of this, they really love to share and teach their cuisine, much more than in other countries where we have lived. And socially, food and the act of eating plays such an important role in day-to-day life, as well as the marking of seasons and holidays.

As a result of all of this immersion, and alongside our day-to-day culinary adventures here, we've been gaining courage and inspiration to experiment with cooking on our own, using a plethora of local ingredients and utilizing several cultural tropes and techniques. We are currently fine-tuning several rhizomatic recipes - you'll see some of the process-based documentation soon - and planning a small series of extending our 'radical voku' experiments, where we co-design and co-cook horizontal foods (aka rhizomes) under a horizontal arrangement with our collaborators... more to come on that soon as well! 

We've been fortunate enough to meet Yoonseo Lee, a Macrobiotic chef and cooking teacher here in Seoul. She's been an enthusiastic guide to Korean cuisine (specificially vegan cooking) and a few weeks ago she took us to an organic market with only Korean-produced groceries.  We picked-up some important rhizomes like turmeric and lotus, and of course a few other things inclduing rice cakes, brown rice oil (totally incredible), and a grain mix used for making hot drinks.  

Later, at her cooking studio, we began a discussion (still continuing) about food, nutrition, and cooking.  She mentioned Helen Nearing's book 'Simple Food for the Good Life', and we followed-up with it right away.  Yoonseo is a great admirer of the book and I can see why. Nearing's classic is an approach that takes common-sense and practicality as a beginning for aesthetic appreciation of food.  In her book, she discusses the beautiful simplicity of an attitude towards food that couples enjoyment with ease of preparation and quality of ingredients.  

As we sample many new foods here in Korea, we're developing a fondness for the plain baked sweet potato and steamed corn-on-the-cob that are basic street foods commonly found around the metro stations.  As well, jubejube (a date-like berry) tea, hyeonmi cha (roasted rice tea) and even Kimchi, are all simply prepared and delicious.  

This attitude towards cooking, enjoyment, and aesthetic is a far-cry from another source we've been investigating: the cuise of chef Ferran Adria of elBulli restaurant fame.  His work has challenged the traditional and professional cooking world with an approach that blends science and ingredients with a goal of no less than creating an entirely new language of cooking.  His work, and that of his students and collaborators, has produced edible experiences that have been compared to art. According to Vincente Todoli, former curator of London's Tate Modern: "Every time I meet something I did not know existed I say, 'Nice to meet you,' because it extended my idea of what life is about and that is what Ferran is doing ... Art or not art? I don't care but certainly this is an experience that takes me into other realms."

As an philosophical and aesthetic base, Adria refers to Brillat Savarin a 19th century gourmande who wrote perhaps the first book on the philosophy of food and cooking, The Physiology of Taste, Or Transcendental Gastronomy. He has been famously quoted on Iron Chef 'Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are" and on the surface, his words ring true to us.  "Animals fill themselves; man eats. The man of mind alone knows how to eat" "The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed" "Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are".  Of course, on closer inspecition, his book must be taken with a grain of salt (no pun intended) ... in comes as no surprise that the language and attitude is hopelessly tied to dominant political and social discourses that basically promote the domination of all of the flora and fauna by white males.  But all that aside, he's got some good one-liners.  In addition, and more importantly, he paved the way for a discussion about cooking that takes our choice in food and sensory experience of eating seriously. 

We would have to agree with him, at the most basic level, that food and cooking do tell us alot about each other, and that cooking connects to a range of issues that are central to the times we live in.  Further to this, we feel that an ethical and delicious approach can be found in simple street foods, sharing with friends, and ethical sourcing of ingredients.  We want to cook in ways that bring us together with other people to share in creativity while making small but significant changes in the way we live everyday. Show us what you eat, and we'll ask you who you want to be.

Nonetheless, who can deny the fun, camp, and irony of iron-chef food olympics, globular balls of olive oil and meat foam, or even hyper processed potato chips? We're developing an approach that attempts to be consistent and well-thought out, while not getting too hard core.  It's all about connections, creation, and development of small shifts: taste buds, and otherwise. 

ginger is a rhizome

Ginger is a rhizome.  It grows horizontally and forms an underground network. In fact, what you see above is a stem that grows laterally, just underneath the surface of the Earth.  Given enough time, an interconnected population of individual plants emerges. In 'A Thousand Plateaus' Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe the rhizome as a non-hierarchial mode of social organization.  

We are fascinated by the common saying 'You are what you eat', and we've been wondering about the implications (physical and metaphorical!) of what we put in our bodies.  Food has the capacity to nurture us at the same time as holding great ethical and symbolic significance.  Specifically, we want to know what happens when we eat rhizomes (and there are many edible rhizomatic plants).  

In Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution, the artist George Gessert discusses the meaning of ornamental plants as historical markers of class.  Basically, fancy flowers which require careful cultivation have been used again and again to denote status.  

We were particularly struck by two examples of ornamental flowers from North Korea.  One is a purple dendrobium orchid named Kimilsungia for Kim-il Sung; the other is a red tuberous begonia named Kimjongilia for Kim Jong-il.  Grown in greenhouses or outside, these flowers are used as part of large scale cultural displays, and fields of the red Kimjongilias bloom for the citizens' enjoyment every spring.

Gessert frames this examination of ornamentals through a larger discussion about our preferences towards wild things vs. domesticated plants and animals.  Deleuze & Guattari make many references to wild animals who run in packs, such as wolves.  They describe the activity and relationships within packs as rhizomatic, in fact.  Referring to this, Gessert points out the time-worn pattern of elevating wildness over domestication, reminding us that perhaps the put-upon laying hen or fluffy puppy are valuable reminders of our vulnerabilty.  

Pochangmacha near Dongincheon StationWhile wandering around Seoul, we have been charmed by Pochangmachas, or Tent Restaurants. We've been thinking about them as spaces not only for quick bite, but also the symbolic nature of tents as mobile containers for culture.  Yes, it is January in Seoul and it is a bit cold for tents, but plenty of people are gathering in them as we write, and of course, the more the merrier: it doesn't take long for one to heat-up.  That's part of the fun.  As a space for food consumption they play the role - as with most street food - as an inherently democratic food dissemination point.  They are an every day occupation of the sidewalk, with cheap food for city dwellers.  It may be that we are little more vulnerable while dwelling in a tent, but they are social spaces where we can be vulnerable together.

Indoor garden, Lotte Mart, Seoul StationLotte Mart at Seoul Station has installed a lettuce factory.  While we didn't pick any up that day, we assume that customers can find very fresh lettuce for sale some days.  While this is a nod towards sustainability, the indoor garden probably can't supply enough lettuce for the entire customer base of Lotte Mart.  It is part of a trend towards supermarkets diving into the local food movement.  While it is often lip-service, at least the garden is a reminder that vegetables must be grown and in fact have an entire life that must be nurtured before they make it to the store shelves.

We're on the hunt for cultivated rhizomes here: ginger, of course, cardamon, tumeric, bamboo, and a few others. We're also delving into Korean cuisine and thinking a lot about cooking as an art form. While most of the food we'll find here in the city will be cultivated on farms (many of them local to Korea), we understand that much of Korean cuisine developed in relation to the mountainous geography and therefore many of the foods are those that are seasonal and were often picked wild, such as Doraji, or bellflower. While Doraji is not technically a rhizome, the roots are eaten, and we are definitely planning to make some of them into a tasty salad.  More on our culinary wanderings to follow soon.

A stone lion in Incheon, South Korea. Someone decided to feed him an orange!

We've begun work on a new project in our series roots + wires.  It's called 'take me as we are' and our aim is to instigate a number of social situations in and around the Incheon Art Platform, in hopes of bringing philosophy and the everyday into conversation.

As in the past, we're taking inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus.  Unlike the past, we're delving further into social events in order to see what happens when this radical text is taken with a sometimes-too-literal and tongue-in-cheek approach.  Despite this element of fun, we are interested in beginning sincere conversations with people, around the possibilities inherent in our daily actions.

This time, we're especially interested in food and of course, our main ingredients will be rhizomes.  This means we're developing recipes including rhizomatic foods like: ginger, wasabi, hops, tumeric, and lotus. These foods are the type of plant that grows with a rhizomatic structure: they have horizontal 'rhizomes' that grow laterally through the soil in order to propagate. They form networks based around nodes, rather than top-down vertical root structures.  This basic understanding of the rhizome becomes a metaphor for organziational structures that are horizontal, dispersed, and modular.  

LED/Garden Demonstration in a Seoul underground station.

Eating is both a conscious and sensory act, one that is highly aesthetic and commonplace at once. Food consumption is social, memory-laden, and community-forming.  Food reflects not only our biological imperatives, but also our socialized desires.  It is simultaneously a creation out of our hands, and a highly controlled enterprise. Food mediates directly the relationship between ourselves and our environment, flora and fauna included. It can be wild, packaged, processed, raw, healthy, foreign, familiar, nurturing, and sometimes a radical lifestyle choice. 

As we learn about local foods to Korea, and Korean cooking, we plan to develop these ideas further, combining our own food histories, the concept of the rhizome, and local cuisine.  We plan to invite people to cook with us, in sometimes unexpected ways and with surprising ingredients. The result, we hope, will be a stimulating conversation, with food at the centre of the table.  

Sinpo Market: side dishes on display. So many to choose from.

dear all y'all,

As you may know by now, with your help, we successfully ran our crowd-funding campaign Lines of Flight, and are now in South Korea as Artists-in-Residence at the Incheon Art Platform.

We want to extend a deep and heartfelt thank you to everyone who supported us through this...

It has been a pretty crazy last two weeks:

On Nov 20th, we Skyped in from Bergen, Norway, where we were for the Piksel Festival, to the Pies In The Sky event in Vancouver, where Mirae's family did a bake sale and revillon for the cause, and raised $1,111 CDN !!

On Nov 26th-27th, we showed a standalone version of our GPS sonicization project SoniCity as part of the Open Platform for the Tracing Mobility exhibition at the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Nov 30th was the last day of our online campaign, and thanks to a last-minute donation, we cleared the goal by $10 !!!

Dec 4th we ran our goodbye party/last minute fundraiser Becoming Animal, and with the help of a few good friends, had an amazing and very late night... 

and we flew to Seoul, by way of Moscow, directly afterwards!

On Dec 10th, we gave a short artist talk at the start of Cut & Paste, a digital design tournament in Seoul, and spent the night with people from Graffiti Research Lab and Seoul Hacker Space in one of the weirdest clubs we have ever set foot in...

Since, we've been to a few galleries and project spaces, have finally recovered from jet lag, and are starting to setup the studio a little bit more seriously.

The next few weeks are all about research for us, as we have quite a bit more to do before we are part of a large group exhibition at the IAP in mid-January. 

Otherwise, we're looking forward to blogging again when we have more established here and when the research has really taken off.  

Again, many many thanks.  

xo

~ j&M