About the Book
Tastes of Justice reveals the diversity of creative and cultural practices in contemporary food art and performances in and between Asia and Australia. It examines the ways in which these engender new frameworks for the sensuous, affective, social, and material dimensions of the alimentary in creative practice.
It interleaves scholarly chapters by artists, curators, theorists, and historians with artists’ perspectives in the form of visual essays, recipes, and case studies. In doing so, it offers conceptual framings in art and curatorial practice and critical understandings of lived experience, challenging the normative epistemologies that typically operate between aesthetics and politics in food art and performance.
The book critically engages with themes including enculturation, diaspora, museology, sustainability, activism, and socially engaged art; it reworks notions of collaboration, correspondence, and commensality in human and more-than-human relations. Tastes of Justice offers its readers unique techniques to attend to invisibilities, inequalities, relationalities, and justice, where the politics of food art is inseparable from its aesthetics – from the way it tastes.
Table of Contents:
1. From Commensality to Cultural Difference: A Critical Introduction 2. The Edible Archive: Performative Repasts and Art History in Singapore 3. Nasi Goreng Diplomacy: Diplomatizing Politicized Rice 4. Strange and Difficult Fruit: Durian as a Marker of Time in Southeast Asian Contemporary Art 5. The Social Kitchen: Art and Collaborative Survival in Indonesia 6. The Taste of Iron: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue 7. Therapeutic Botany: Plant Medicine in Contemporary Art 8. Boat Noodle Soup Three Ways: Some Notes on Hospitality, Indeterminacy and Cultural Exchange in Food-Art Performance and Social Practice 9. Bakudapan: Please Eat Wildly 10. MMMEEOW: Mapping Migratory Meeals at the Ends of Worlds 11. Mutton Fishing: The Importance of the Ocean for Cultural Continuity 12. The Sensory and the Social: Food, Memory, and Community Engagement in Aftertaste 13. Chew Chew Spit Spit and A Jeepney Ride 14. Following Vegetal Worlds: Towards Expanded Curatorial Methods 15. If a coconut falls: Cultural Reclamation Through Colonial Archives 16. Multispecies Commensality: Sharing a Meal with Fungi, Chickpeas, and Seaweed 17. Putting Your Stomach on the Line: Justice, Vulnerability, and Hospitality in Food Art Praxis 18. A Coda in Recipes for Tasting Justice
About the Author :
Francis Maravillas is Programme Leader, BA (Hons) Art Histories and Curatorial Practices: Asia and the World, and Senior Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore. His current research focuses on the aesthetics and politics of food in contemporary Asian art. He is particularly interested in the performative, relational, and sensuous processes of the alimentary in art, its relationship to the everyday and entanglement in politics of survival in a region marked by multiple, overlapping (post-)colonial histories and processes of globalization. Francis is widely published and he co-curated Bruised Food: A Living Laboratory (2019), at RMIT University Gallery, Melbourne.
Marnie Badham is an artist-researcher with creative and critical research sits at the intersection of socially engaged art practices with a focus on Indigenous-settler collaboration, food-art-politics, and creative cartographies, coupled with expertise in participatory research methodologies and the politics of cultural measurement. Through aesthetic and dialogic forms of encounter and exchange, Marnie’s collaborative practice attends to relational ethics while bringing together disparate groups of people (artists, communities, industry, local government) in dialogue to examine and affect local issues. Marnie is Associate Professor, School of Art RMIT University, Naarm/Melbourne and a director for Res Artis: Worldwide Network for Artist Residencies.
Stephen Loo works at the transdisciplinary nexus of philosophy, architecture, design, art, performance, psychology, and science. He is Professor of Design at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and a visiting professor at the Centre for Philosophical Technologies, Arizona State University. He is on the international steering committee of Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) and a founding partner of architecture and interpretation practice Mulloway Studio, in Adelaide.
Madeleine Collie is a curator, writer, and researcher whose work engages with plants, poetics, and ecological relations in contemporary art. She holds a PhD in art history, theory and curatorial practice from Monash University. She founded the Food Art Research Network in 2020 and is co-editor of Earth Ethics: Art, Institutions and Regenerative Practices (Monash University Publishing, 2025). She has been an artist in residence at HIAP, Helsinki, and guest curator at Kin Museum, Sápmi.
Review :
This volume is a timely response to the burgeoning practices of food-based art and their politics, highlighting some of the most compelling demonstrations of this in Asia and Australia today. It is unique not just for how it connects creative and critical inquiries into the aesthetics and politics of food with urgent questions of justice and care, but also as a rare gathering of artist writings. Significantly, the book’s critical layering of artist voices alongside the perspectives of scholars and curators in and from Asia and Australia contributes to the ‘discursive density’ being called for by leading thinkers and practitioners in the evolving field of contemporary art.
Michelle Antoinette, Associate Professor in Art History and Theory at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia
This is a book that is bursting at the seams with ideas, offering multi-disciplinary critical insights into food art in Asia and Australia. Combining approaches from historians, curators and artists working with communities allows the reader glimpses into the often hidden and less theorised processes of social art practices where the event of ingredients being sourced, food prepared, cooked and served facilitates intercultural exchanges and postcolonial self-reflection among artists, community cooks and consumers of food and food-art.
Gaik Cheng Khoo, Professor and Deputy Dean of Research and Sustainability, Sunway University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
