Jen Pei Cheng

Cheng Jen-pei , a visual artist, was born in 1983 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. 
Most of her creative forms are “participatory arts” in which daily oral history is collected through interviews. The contemporary "food culture” is studied from two viewpoints - “humanity issues” and “ecosystem and environment”.

Her food studies and creations aim to explore diet culture beyond food or cooking. Other constituent factors behind the food culture include product plantation, food transportation, food processing, industrial history, political food, ethnic migration, and others, intending to depict the appearance of food in history via visual arts. 

She had many art residency programs in France, Vietnam, the Philippines, Finland, and Japan, where she proposed different exhibition projects focused on the different food cultures, exploring the correlations between ethnic migration and diet customs, as well as food culture and historical memories. In different countries, she conducted interviews to dig into the memories and stories of the local citizens. Food and personal objects are used to form a food sculpture and then presented with photo equipment. 

2021 "Perfect Ratio" Spice Workshop

The Southeast-Asian food culture is quite flavorful, and the migrant workers in Taiwan would try to prepare meals with their hometown ingredients purchased from different channels. In particular, during holidays and festivities, meal sharing has become an important way for emotional exchanges. In the 2021 project, Cheng started with what she was good at – “the connection between food and emotions”. Based on the field studies and workshops where she collected the ideal love forms from the Indonesian migrant workers, she developed her creative research project. She hosted workshops in Serve the People Association where she invited migrant workers from the shelter center to write down their own love memories and fantasies. The participants were also guided to pick the spices that correspond to their fantasies with their smell senses. In this way, they made a personal and exclusive spiced chocolate – one of a kind. 

2022 "When Spices are Marriage Ingredients" 

In the project of the previous year, Cheng personally witnessed an Indonesian marriage in Tainan where she intended to further explore the aspects that would mutually affect each other in Indonesian couples in intercultural marriages. An extremely high percentage of Indonesian people are affected by their nation's policies and beliefs when considering marriage. In the 2022 project, the focus was on "the uses of spices", a way to show two groups of different cultural backgrounds. As she searched for intercultural marriages, she would observe the spice combinations used in their daily lives and diets. As they initiated the dialogue with food, they also discussed their feelings about the marriage, and all the sweet-sourness of the marriage was recorded in recipe-like narratives. The love stories collected from the interviews are depicted with spices and recipes.