A reading by artist, interdisciplinary designer, and researcher Johnny Chang, presented within the context of the PARSE Practitioners Programme.
A New Gourmet, Moving Heaven and Earth is an in-progress lecture performance that traces how everyday foods—fruit, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, wild weeds, sticky rice dumplings, noodles—carry the entangled histories of survival, extraction, and everyday resilience across Taiwan and its diasporas.
Dwelling in archival gaps, in fractured languages shaped by shifting state policies and diasporic dislocation, and in the silences that structure intergenerational memory, this work follows ingredients and dishes across overlapping, unresolved colonial and imperial formations. Here, food is not simply cultural heritage, but a material witness to histories and lives shaped through the entanglement of settler colonialism, plantation economies, and their afterlives in displacement and exile.
Weaving personal, collective, and speculative fragments, the lecture performance moves through fragmented and reconstituted memory, reflecting on the tensions that haunt the ongoing negotiation of collective belonging, plurality, and solidarities in and beyond Taiwan. In attending to histories of both militant and everyday resistance, this work explores how different forms of struggle and unsettled histories are unevenly remembered and transmitted across generations, and carried through everyday food practices that both sustain and transform them.
Johnny Chang is part of the PARSE Practitioners Programme
The PARSE Practitioners Programme supports the relationship between art and research by providing artists from a variety of disciplines with the space and time to work on a nascent project. Based in the Artistic Faculty at Gothenburg University, the Programme invites individuals or collectives to undertake new work in the context of artistic research. The Practitioners Programme is intended as time to pursue research and/or realise a specific project, while drawing on the PARSE network and the Faculty’s research and expertise.
PARSE is an international artistic research publishing platform and biennial conference based in The Artistic Faculty at the University of Gothenburg
Johnny Chang (US-TW/SE) is a Stockholm-based interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher working across visual communication, graphic design, publishing, lecture performance, and writing. His practice engages with the sense-making (and breaking)—or poetics—of visual language and material culture, nourishing collective capacities for sensing, feeling, and being. Chang’s artistic practice and research attends to questions of care, access, and tactics for gathering, listening to resilient knowledges from below that emerge from diaspora liminality, community memory, and social movement archiving. Through a citational practice, he works with the re/de/composition of material and symbolic-discursive residues to reflect on conditions and processes of social reproduction and relation.
Image Description: (Top) Home care worker handing breakfast to my grandmother, Taipei. (Bottom Left) Reproduction of the “New Gourmet” restaurant sign at the Su Beng Memorial, New Taipei City. (Bottom Right) Fruit stand at the Chenghuang Temple Market, Hsinchu.