Jason Phu

Jason Phu’s multi-disciplinary practice brings together a wide range of sometimes contradictory references from traditional ink paintings to street art, everyday vernacular to official records, personal narratives to historical events. Working across installation, painting and performance, Jason frequently uses humour as a device to explore experiences of cultural dislocation. Simultaneously he uses stories of ghosts, spirits, demons, and gods as a personification of these concepts.

Jason has shown in the Dobell Drawing Biennale, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2018); The Burrangong Affray, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2018); Primavera (2018); Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art (2018); and was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House for the 2019 Art Assembly Commission (2019). This year he is showing in The Way We Eat at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and is an artist for the arts festival Rising in Melbourne. He is represented by Station Gallery, Melbourne and Chalk Horse, Sydney.

“The important thing for us to remember is that whatever ingredients are available, we can cook them in the Chinese way.” R. Geechoun - Cooking the Chinese Way, 1948.

“Zan drove me from Sydney to Melbourne when Sydney turned into a Covid OrangeZone. I stayed with her and her partner (and two lovely dogs) in Melbourne while we waited for our test results and saw a book on her counter, Cooking the Chinese Way.

I’d seen a first edition was to be included in this exhibition and had wanted to look at it before I left for Melbourne but had run out of time while making the dash for the border. Zan offered to give me the book - it had been left to her by her father. She made me a sauerkraut and cheese sandwich while I leafed through the book.

I had spent the year with my parents during lockdown in Sydney, the longest I’d stayed with them since I was 19. My mum used to cook for us when I was a kid, she never enjoyed it as a part-time worker and housewife. Dad always loved cooking but worked too long hours to ever get around to it. Since dad retired, he cooks every day now and mum’s rediscovered her love for cooking. She is ‘relearning’ all grandma’s recipes from Beijing. She finds the recipes on WeChat rather than asking grandma because laolao passed away a few years ago.

There is only today to eat a meal, tomorrow we can cook something different, and the day after that who knows where we will all be 2021 video stills

Grandma passed at the ripe old age of 93, having smoked a pack-a-day since she was 16. For her, every meal past breakfast was meticulously planned and budgeted in her ruled notepad, only the best (within budget). Breakfast was a mantou with some fermented tofu and a thin menthol cigarette over the latest world billiards championships or English premier league, whatever was in season.”