Buffet Toi & Moi

This project is inspired by the name of a certain Chinese restaurant in downtown Montréal, called Noodles U & Me. Using Chinese restaurants in general as a form of ethnic display, I am interested in issues related to identity politics to question what is Chinese, and what is considered to be “Chinese”. I draw from my personal experiences in “La Pagode Royale”, a Polynesian/Chinese restaurant that my parents owned in the eighties, to bring up notions of cultural authenticity and my own relationship to this inherited culture. As Buffet Toi & Moi proposes, what is the dynamic between the ‘you’ the ‘me’, and how does it change?

This installation is comprised of several display elements. A bubbling red sauce floor projection, meant to be walked on, serves as both signage for the title of this installation, and as promotion for a mock Chinese restaurant. A wall of restaurant ceramic dishes, light boxes with close up images of my hand holding various ceramic dishes with Asian motifs and imagery are linked to short autobiographic text, raising the notion of the ‘authentic’. Two video loops of dry ramen noodles being passed from hand to hand suggests it’s role as currency.

Investigating the marketing and commodification of ethnicity through food, I explore how ethno/cultural stereotypes are presented, then consumed. How do we as the recipient/consumer/audience accept and perpetuate notions of the ‘other’, and how does the display of ethnicity affect self-image and redefine the real, through this transaction?

- Shelly Low, 2010