Remember, to Eat

About the Project

This cooking series looks at food as a remembrance of a person’s life and asks people to select recipes they would like to be remembered by.

Not only have they selected their favoured recipes, they also show how to cook the dish.

The project encompassed four films and they are:

1. Junah’s Ikan Bakar & Pucuk Ubi Masak Lemak
A widow, Junah lives with her dependent son who was disabled from an accident 20 years ago. She learnt to cook from volunteering for the Muslim community and the mosque, raising funds and providing food for events.

2. Mas’ Laksa Johor 
Mas migrated and lived in Johor for a good while but returned to live in Singapore 3 years ago. Her mother, a great cook, still lives in Johor and Mas calls her regularly for cooking advice.

3. Mr Tan’s Moringa Omelette, Moringa Fish Soup 
The guerilla gardener of Telok Blangah, Kee Seng tends to his garden of vegetables and medicinal plants every day. He was a professional cook all through his life, from his first job at one of Singapore’s chilli crab restaurants to his last job at Marina Bay Sands.

4. Yip Hoy’s Chicken Curry
A triple bypass heart surgery 3 years ago has stopped Yip Hoy from working mainly as a dishwasher and also from regular cooking, except for her chicken curry, still a family favourite and a must-have on special occasions.

Creation Process

Food becomes more of a sensory memory than a culinary adventure. If a person lives alone, cooking often discontinues. Yet, the emotions around food and its associations with people involved in our lives remain vivid.

This cooking series looks at food as a remembrance of a person’s life and asks people to select recipes they would like to be remembered by. Not only have they selected their favoured recipes, they also show how to cook the dish. The personal stories and emotions around cooking centre around questions like: why do we cook, who do we cook for, and who cooked for us?

When we are young and able to cook, we don’t seem to have the time to cook but when we are old, we are less physically able and even often less motivated to cook especially for those who live alone, or live with a dependent. The work was shaped and developed through meeting the residents mostly living at Blk 7.

These were the encounters:

Meeting the makciks (Malay aunties) who remember their kampong life growing vegetables and herbs for their home cooking.
Discovering from the makciks how recipes are shared by women who have the primary responsibility to cook for the family.
Meeting the guerrilla gardener Mr Tan, who was a professional cook.
Meeting many senior citizens who no longer cook but eat outside food, when they used to cook the family meal regularly or to earn a living.

Watch this video on the creation process, together with other artworks in the public art installation.

Credits

Artist

Shirley Soh was born, works and lives in Singapore. She is an artist, lecturer, an erstwhile journalist and a perpetual student. Trained first in ceramics, she has branched into various mediums spanning embroidery to video making exploring recurrent themes of biodiversity and sustainability.

Interested in how individuals, community, economy and the environment interdependently connect in constantly shifting—and not often benign—ways, she has grown plants, worked with migrant workers and prison inmates, created a retail shop and meditated for her artwork. She has exhibited in Singapore, as well as, France, Malaysia, Switzerland and the United States.