Online short course and in-person residency in China
January 15–March 31, 2027
Food and art research residency / Location: Shanghai, China / Dates: Online course January–March 2027 (on Saturdays); residency March 22–31, 2027/ Curated by Nin Yan and Qisen Song, organised by The Gramounce.
“Exploring the Dialectical Tension between Governance and Subversion Through Food”
This short course explores the dialectical tension in modern China between food as a tool of governance—used to discipline, unify, and manufacture a collective identity—and food as a site of subversion—where ordinary people navigate the cracks of the system through culinary ingenuity.
Over two months, we feature eight weekly online foundation seminars highlighting diverse Chinese practitioners who position food at an intersection of the contradictions and frictions encountered in their creative work. This program culminates in a ten-day residency in Shanghai, using the city as a prism of investigation. Through shared “banquets”, film screenings, active cooking, field visits, and guest seminars, we look beyond the plate to see the Chinese dinner table and the functioning mechanism behind as a theatre of power, where socialism and capitalism, scarcity and abundance, and centralised order and individual agency are negotiated every day.
You can sign up to both or just to the online course. Find out more and sign up here.
