Tastes of Justice

This edited volume explores ‘the tastes of justice,’ by critically probing the aesthetics and politics of food art practices in and across Asia and Australia.

Routledge

 

Tastes of Justice
Ariana Chaivaranon, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue, performed at deCentral Bangkok, Thailand, 2024. Photo: Non Chanapat. Courtesy the artist and A+ Works of Art

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.

Book Cover, Tastes of Justice, 2025, Routledge
Cooking in Pressure, bakudapan (2017), embroidery on cotton fabric. Image courtesy of Bakudapan. Photographer Khairunnisa