Bunha-bunhanga: Once these were lands of plenty

In conversation with Sabrina Baker

In recent years, I have worked alongside Jason Phu on a number of projects, notably My Parents Met at the Fish Market commissioned for West Space in 2017. This professional relationship became a friendship, with Jason often staying with my partner and chef Nagesh Seethiah and I on his frequent trips to Melbourne. Almost every visit would become a conversation over dinner about life, politics, family, careers, love and of course food. These are also recurring topics in Jason’s art practice.

When art meets food, their offspring are often surreal. One need only look back to the ubiquitous presence in kitchens world-wide of reproductions of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fruity portraits or René Magritte’s iconic green apple to find triggers for this impulse.

The relationship between food and art has long dominated the world of painting, photography, literature and cinema in an often-noxious pairing of gratuitous ingestion and aesthetics, most notably in Marco Ferreri’s The Grande Bouffe (1975) and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and His Lover (1989).