Mo Kong at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space
Tucked between the intoxicating fumes of spiced tagines at Zerza Moroccan Kitchen and neat rows of dried Japanese items at Ni Japanese Deli is Mo Kong’s presentation “Lounge of a Prophet” at Cuchifritos Gallery + Venture House. The shut proximity of Asian and North African delicacies awakens historic, reductive myths concerning the Orient contained in the modern meals bazaar that’s Essex Market on Manhattan’s Decrease East Facet—the place the gallery is positioned—bringing ahead the present’s most important critiques.
Beneath the exhibition house’s yellowed mild, Kong has constructed what seems to be a modernist curio store or fortune-teller’s parlor, replete with arched doorways and clear black surfaces at countertop peak. Drawers of dehydrated produce native to Asia, akin to dragon fruit and citron, incubate quietly behind a glass show. Unusual units whir with altering temperature and light-weight. Herbaceous steam rises from cupboard orifices.
The scents concocted from Asian substances in Kong’s work have sometimes induced repulsion or posed a racial menace to the present white world order. But the artist’s embrace of innocuous-yet-disfavored odors doesn’t recommend that the mere tolerance of racialized smells will extinguish anti-Asian racism. As a substitute, Kong’s utilization of the olfactory asks what sorts of racial animus suffuse domains outdoors of the seen.
Kong’s constructed setting is impressed by the form of the empty house between two traces in a graph that charts a couple of decade’s value of financial and ecological collapse—a shadow realm that receives little consideration but appears to harbor equal components romance and despair. Relatively than flatten the curve as an antidote, the artist has extruded it in order that all of us could dwell in its queasy dimensions.
Jars of fruits pickled by fictional firm NEW YORKOOL—foodstuffs that the artist predicts might be endangered as a consequence of world warming and nationalist commerce insurance policies—interrogate a hypothetical answer to preserving “unique” cultures. Without delay rejected and retained, prized but disposable, the hermetically sealed, live-fermented meals epitomize what theorist Anne Anlin Cheng has known as the method of racial melancholia in the US. In an age of neoliberalism, tasteful branding and the theater of disaster come as a package deal deal. Hope you’re hungry.
— Danielle Wu
