Tastes of Justice, Routledge Publication

Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food-art Practices in Asia and Australia  is a scholarly and artistic publication, edited by Francis Maravillas, Marnie Badham, Stephen Loo and Madeleine Collie that 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 practices 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.

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

Tasting of Justice unfolded through public programs in Singapore and Sydney that activated the themes of the publication Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food-Art Practices in Asia and Australia. At LASALLE College of the Arts, two days of talks, workshops and performances brought together artists and researchers exploring food as a medium for artistic and political inquiry. Highlights included Nathalie Muchamad’s lecture I wonder how it tastes like on breadfruit and cinema, Keg de Souza’s talk Bananas: A Wild Story, Elia Nurvista’s participatory workshop Reading Palm, and the Critical Craft Collective’s sing-along Rasa Sayang (For the love of food). A Sydney launch at Magenta House featured Chu Hao Pei’s Singapore Fried Rice from Nasi Goreng Diplomacy, Keg de Souza’s takeaway zine, and Tasting Justice: Cooking the CODA. A podcast with 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art extended the dialogue online.