The Works：Music x food: "Feeding Frenzy", Mumbai artist Yogesh Barve & Trevor Yeung

A little something to get your teeth into in today's show, metaphorically at least. You may or may not be convinced by the concept of food as edible art, or indeed impressed by people’s mobile phone photographs of their lunch, but from still lives to conceptual art there’s a long history of connection between art and food. On the most practical level, occasionally cash-strapped artists – including Picasso - have been known to pay for their meals with their handiwork. And undoubtedly for many restaurants, a few choice art works in the environment can lend an extra layer of sophistication to the food. In contemporary art, works have been created from foodstuffs, including coffee, rice, milk, cupcakes, and meat. For Rirkrit Tiravanija, who cooked and served Thai curry at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, bringing cooking and eating into the art space emphasises social connection and a sense of community. Shared music can take on a similar role, and recently, here in Hong Kong, a group of musicians and cooks came together to combine music and food.
Historically, there are strong trade and administrative connections between the colonial pasts of India and of Hong Kong. Many of Hong Kong’s earliest European officials and businessmen had already spent time in India before coming here. During his recent artist-in-residence visit to Hong Kong, this shared history and its reverberations provided the inspiration for Mumbai artist Yogesh Barve and his partner Saviya Lopes to create a series of new works. For both artists, ideas of equality, immigration and identity can be traced through some of the things we use every day, whether found objects, digital technologies, mobile phone cameras, or even Internet search engines.
While Yogesh Barve uses inanimate objects to examine social and historical concepts, for local artist Trevor Yeung they can also allow us to trace the outlines of human emotion and relationships. In his exhibition “The Sunset of Last Summer” plants and horticulture, aquatic life, photography and installations, mirror the memory of a past love affair, inviting us to consider the power of nostalgia, selective memory, and the ideals and hopes of personal relationships.