Memory Jar’ |Buy One and Get (Me) Free!
Memory Jar' | Buy One and Get (Me) Free! approaches Kimchi not as a food product but as a living medium of traveling memory.
In 2018, I moved from Seoul to Amsterdam and at the same time, my memory and culture have traveled with me. Since then, Kimchi has been my reenactment of memory about home, family, and myself in the past. Whenever I feel lost and displaced, I went to Chinatown to buy cabbage, salted them overnight, and make a fishy spicy base with lots of garlic to make my kimchi. My recipe and practice have evolved as well and now I make kimchi not only with traditional ingredients like napa cabbage but with local vegetables like kohlrabi.
During the fair, there will be jars of fermented goods sold as a product.
It will be a variety of Kimchi with an attached Zine, containing the recipe and personal memory around the act of making and eating Kimchi. I intend to stay outside of the current commodification of Asian food and its people. No repetitive imagery of Asian culture, but personalized images and words will be used, in hopes that the market and consumers will understand that the food is attached to its people.
Jihyun, also goes by Gigi here in Amsterdam, defines herself as a 'Self-Migrant', a modern diaspora who have voluntarily migrated from home and settled down in a city where she does not have any connection.
She likes to cook and tell a story while eating with others.
This is why she started a Kimchi workshop/making in her free time, to meet new people and connect with them through sharing her food that she has been eating since she was two.
She is currently working on widening the colonial lens to the issues that have been neglected in the mainstream discourses, which concerns the still existing power dynamic between the West and the East, including the displacement of people, culture, fauna and flora and how that shaped our everyday lives.
