Ye Shufang: Singapore's food art specialist

The use of food in fine art has come a long way since the Egyptian tomb paintings and Cézanne’s Still Life with Fruit Basket. With performance and installation art becoming more mainstream, these days gallery-goers are just as likely to find food smothered all over an artist as they are to see it neatly framed on the canvas.

Some of art’s most memorable gastronomic encounters in the contemporary canon include Janine Antoni’s 600lb chocolate cube covered in her bite marks, an object that would become an unintentional emblem of the debate surrounding eating disorders; Sarah Lucas’ two fried eggs, which stood for breasts in her tongue-in-cheek sculpture; and Jana Sterbak’s dress made from 50lb of raw flank steaks. It’s no coincidence that these three pieces are all by female artists. Many celebrated works of food art have been created by women and carry a resonance that’s arguably (if not overtly) political. Since food relates to issues of consumption, abjection, body image and gender roles, this is not entirely surprising.

Deceptively subtler, but no less powerful in her approach to food, is internationally exhibited Ye Shufang, whose masterpieces have become iconic in Singaporean art circles. From creating chocolate linework across the walls of the LaSalle Gallery to filling Plastique Kinetic Worms with Black Forest gâteau, Ye has used a variety of food in her work but is best known for using the medium agar-agar, which she pressed between glass at Utterly Art, moulded into sculptures and used to cover vast amounts of floor space.

Citing artists such as Marina Abramovic and Suzann Victor, Ye notes inherent links between women and the use of food in art, believing that for female artists, food is as powerful as the use of the body. The art scene in Singapore seems to bear similar testimony. Think of Amanda Heng, who invited us to pluck beansprouts alongside her in an examination of gendered conversation; Noni Kaur, who created massive floor murals using dyed coconut shavings to depict female genitalia; and more recently, Iranian Salema Salehi, who sat in a box as onlookers poured sugar on her until she was fully submerged, in a bid to raise awareness of women’s desire to escape social and cultural conditioning.

Ye began using food as a medium when she started questioning whether art needed to be taught. She was curious as to whether everyday processes and gestures could be just as ‘artful’, and had taught herself to weld in order to create a series of large sculptures. ‘I listed down existing skills that I had that were not art-trained – skills that any other person might have. Writing, breathing, basic cooking. For me, this means boiling water…does playing count?’ While Ye’s work is indeed playful, there is something tragic about it. Its initial form is always pleasing to view and, indeed, to smell; it evokes ideas of childhood and the desire to touch, despite gallery conventions informing us not to. But beneath the naive impulses the work evokes, its own temporal nature narrates its inevitable decay over the course of each exhibition; its changing forms, colour and smell seem to speak of the nature of time itself.

It’s no surprise that memories of childhood play an important role in the conceptual stages of Ye’s artmaking. ‘My mother used to make the most beautiful dark brown Milo-flavoured agar-agar,’ she says. ‘It would be chilled in the fridge as we had our dinner. I would wait in anticipation for my mother to bring the chilled metal mould (condensation droplets already forming on the exterior of the metal surface) to the dinner table and tip out the jelly. For several seconds, the agar-agar sat there in its perfection – cold, dark brown, half-solid, opaque yet translucent. Its surface was perfect like a marble sculpture, yet it was vulnerable.’

As personal as family, yet as collectively significant as the idea of remembering, one might say that Ye’s work taps into a communal subconscious of decaying memories, urging people to reconsider what her medium might mean to us as individuals. ‘For me, it links straight back to the mother’s kitchen – not the male chef in the grand restaurant, but the women who cook at home. The women whose voices are seen in self-scribed, spice-stained recipe books and heard through whispered secret ingredients.’ It’s comforting that despite being liberated from domesticity, so many female artists still use food to communicate. But while some might be tempted to see it as women ‘returning to their roots’, I suspect artists would view it more accurately as re-appropriation rather than return: the same medium, a different audience, and innumerably more modes of consumption.