Operating between my origins in China, a decade of life in Japan, and my current practice in London, my perspective has been shaped by the friction of mobility. In my artistic practice, I have long been preoccupied with a biological paradox: while local ingredients continually reconstruct the cells of my body, this form of “metabolic citizenship” remains in conflict with the static rigidity of nationality.

This contradiction led me to understand the mouth as more than a sensory organ. The mouth is also a political border. Ingestion can function as an act of assimilation, while refusal can become a form of resistance. Food is therefore one of the primary media through which belonging is negotiated, reproduced, and contested.

This ethnographic sensibility developed during my undergraduate studies in Japan. Through electives in cultural anthropology, I undertook immersive fieldwork that fundamentally redirected my artistic practice. For my graduation project, I investigated the liminal spaces of Japanese love hotels and fūzoku culture, combining sociological research with artistic installation. This experience established fieldwork as the backbone of my practice.

After relocating to the United Kingdom, my focus moved from external urban spaces toward the internal landscape of the body. I began to examine diaspora and migration through nutrition, using food as a methodology for tracing how identity is sustained, altered, and reconstructed in a foreign environment.

This inquiry was catalysed by an object I found in London: a discarded colonial-era “Oriental” cookbook. As I turned its pages, I encountered recipes that presented themselves as representations of Asian food while functioning largely as Western fantasies of the East. The dishes had been reconstructed to suit a colonial palate.

The cookbook provoked a crisis in my practice. Would reproducing these recipes in London simply repeat the colonial gaze? Could an artwork that displayed such recipes avoid turning histories of migration and adaptation into aesthetic material? I became increasingly concerned with the extractive tendencies of artistic representation, particularly the process through which local survival strategies are repackaged as exotic spectacles for privileged audiences.

This concern created an ethical urgency to move beyond the position of an observer who displays colonial history. I wanted to investigate the structures that produce “palatable otherness”: the economic, political, and cultural mechanisms through which migrant food is modified, consumed, and recognised.

During my MFA at UCL, where I graduated with Distinction, these questions developed into a series of metabolic experiments testing the boundaries of the nation-state.

In Breeding Migration, I investigated the global supply chains of salmon farming. I used the farmed fish to examine what sociologist Michaela DeSoucey calls “gastronationalism”: the process through which food becomes a means of defining and policing national identity. The project questioned why nation-states insist on the fixed authenticity of their citizens while relying on the fluid, transnational circulation of ingredients, animals, labour, and capital.

Drawing on Isabel Hofmeyr’s concept of hydrocolonialism, I juxtaposed the fluid logistics of biological life with the rigidity of immigration bureaucracy. I printed visa documents onto salmon skin, treating the farmed fish as a case study through which to consider the migrant body. The work asked why the body is treated as a static archive of nationality even as it is continuously transformed by its local environment.

In biological terms, the migrant body absorbs water, minerals, bacteria, plants, and animals from the place in which it lives. Its cells are assembled from locally available substances. Yet this metabolic process has little influence on legal belonging. A body may become materially local while remaining politically foreign.

In Tastes Like Paper, I printed the United Kingdom’s immigration white paper onto edible paper and invited audiences to ingest it. By transforming policy into a bolus, I staged the mouth as a site of political decision. In dialogue with Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the work explored the tension between incorporation and rejection. Swallowing the document enacted the internalisation of state language, while refusing or discarding it made visible the body’s resistance to institutional authority.

These works visualised the symptoms of border politics, though they also revealed the limitations of aesthetic metaphor. Representation could expose contradictions, yet it could not fully account for the labour relations, historical processes, and economic structures supporting them.

To deepen the inquiry, I stepped out of the studio and entered London’s migrant kitchens, adopting a methodology of reciprocal labour. I exchanged physical work—cooking, preparing ingredients, cleaning, and assisting with service—for access to the field. By participating in the operational rhythms of professional kitchens, I began to observe the production of migrant identity through repetitive acts of labour.

Taste emerged as an economic structure as much as a sensory experience. It was produced through negotiations between customers, workers, restaurant owners, supply chains, public expectations, and ideas of authenticity. The migrant cook was required to repeat and standardise particular flavours, often under conditions shaped by racialised assumptions about what their cuisine should taste like.

Within this taste economy, authenticity did not operate as a stable origin. It functioned as a demand placed upon the migrant worker. The chef was expected to perform cultural difference while also making that difference legible and palatable to the consumer.

I expanded this research through experiments with fermentation, including water kefir and sourdough. Fermentation offered a framework for thinking through slow transformation, interdependence, and collective survival. Fermented food is produced by multispecies communities whose activities remain partially unpredictable. Bacteria and yeasts translate one substance into another through shared temporal structures.

These microbial processes offered a way to consider diasporic knowledge. Like a starter culture, culinary knowledge is carried, divided, fed, altered, and passed between people. It survives through repetition, yet every repetition takes place under different environmental conditions. Fermentation therefore complicates the idea that cultural continuity depends on preserving an unchanged original.

This understanding has shaped my current research into the genealogy of “sweet and sour” within the Chinees-Indisch, or Chinese-Indonesian, culinary legacy. I approach dishes such as babi pangang through the concept of strategic ambivalence. Rather than interpreting them as diluted or inauthentic versions of an original cuisine, I consider them as products of historical negotiation.

In colonial and postcolonial contexts, migrants often deployed exoticism as a form of economic capital. They adapted ingredients, presentation, and flavour to meet the expectations of dominant consumers. These adaptations cannot be reduced to passive assimilation. They also reveal calculated strategies for survival, visibility, and commercial participation.

Sweet-and-sour sauce can therefore be understood as a form of productive contamination. It is a flavour produced through contact, coercion, translation, and compromise. Constructed partly to accommodate a colonial or European palate, it subsequently became a demand inscribed upon the migrant chef’s body. The cook was expected to reproduce a flavour that represented cultural difference while remaining predictable to the consumer.

The category of “Chinese food” in Europe was consequently shaped through encounters among Chinese migration, Indonesian colonial history, Dutch consumer culture, restaurant economies, and racialised fantasies of Asia. Its apparent familiarity conceals a dense network of displacement and adaptation.

Through this research, food becomes an archive of unequal encounters. Recipes record histories that may remain absent from official documents. Ingredients reveal trade routes, colonial policies, substitutions, and environmental constraints. Cooking techniques preserve forms of embodied knowledge transmitted through families, workplaces, and migrant communities.

The body also participates in this archive. Migrant cooks reproduce history through gestures repeated over thousands of working hours: chopping, stirring, frying, seasoning, tasting, and serving. The violence of culinary expectation is therefore carried not only in language or imagery, but in muscles, routines, fatigue, and bodily discipline.

My practice continues to move between artistic production and ethnographic research. Art allows contradictions to become sensory and material, while anthropology provides methods for locating those contradictions within broader systems of power. Together, they offer a way to examine how borders are consumed, metabolised, and reproduced through everyday life.

Metabolic citizenship describes the unstable condition that emerges from this process. It names the gap between biological incorporation and legal recognition, between becoming materially entangled with a place and remaining institutionally excluded from it.

Food makes this gap visible. Every meal contains histories of migration, labour, extraction, adaptation, and desire. To eat is to enter these histories bodily. The mouth becomes the threshold at which foreignness is accepted, transformed, rejected, or made profitable.

The politics of belonging therefore takes place not only at airports, consulates, and national borders. It is also enacted in kitchens, restaurants, digestive systems, microbial cultures, and the repetitive gestures through which food is produced. By studying these spaces, I aim to understand how identity is made palatable, how authenticity becomes labour, and how migrant bodies negotiate belonging through the substances they prepare and consume.