Silas Fong was born in Hong Kong, studied there and in Cologne, Germany, and has lived and worked in Korea for the past eight years. His path as both an educator within Korea’s art institutions and a foreign artist forms the ground and point of departure for his practice. Growing up in Hong Kong, he experienced the cultural hybridity of the British colonial period firsthand. In an international art environment, he encountered the identity of the migrant artist and the language of institutional critique; in Korea, he has worked as an artist and teacher within an unfamiliar social and linguistic context. These layered experiences explain why his projects dissect the gaps between art institutions and everyday life: his own identity and experience stand within those gaps.

Fong’s work has consistently experimented with twisting the boundaries of art institutions and the social conventions surrounding them. From the SAD School of Artists Development project to art-rental broadcasts borrowing the format of home shopping, and the sound installation Greetings for Artists, he appropriates institutional forms, parodies them, and builds fictional systems that draw viewers into participation. As a result, the languages of artistic production and consumption, education and institutions cease to appear self-evident or natural. They emerge as structures that can become unstable and be overturned at any moment. Kitchen Notes likewise places the artist at an intersection of migration and identity, labour and care, through the everyday medium of food.

Held at Daechumoo Fine Art in Gangneung in 2025, Kitchen Notes reveals both continuity and a shift in Fong’s practice, extending his longstanding concerns into everyday labour and care. Working from the locality and lived experience of Gangneung, he learned directly from local bakers and a sausage maker, and presented site-specific installations and performances centred on baking and sharing bread. By sharing bread and sausages with visitors, he brought into the exhibition an attitude of returning skills learned locally to the local community, allowing viewers to experience the “rules of the institution.” The exhibition’s central concern becomes a more layered experiment in the rhythms of life, the time of labour, and the conditions of forming relationships through food and consumption.

During this process, Fong learned directly from two bakers and a sausage maker in Gangneung. To record these learning relationships and the transmission of skills, he designed and printed his own certificates of completion. These are not qualifications issued by a state or accredited institution. Yet they bear the actual names of the workshops, their proprietors and addresses, together with the handwritten signatures of all three craftspeople. They are therefore not a performance of “false certification,” but real documents grounded in relationships and places. By appropriating the document’s form—its layout, language and signature—outside institutional authority, Fong shows that authority need not descend vertically from above: it can be constituted through agreements made on site and the testimony of relationships. This certification based on autonomous relationships makes visible where institutional trust arises. The fact of learning and a signed relationship can offer stronger evidence than regulations and official seals. Through these documents, viewers see that institutional authority cannot be reduced to a binary of official recognition and its absence. It is established on multiple levels through a social process: who transmitted what to whom, how it was transmitted, and who took responsibility by signing to confirm it. What viewers encounter is not a fictional device, but the recognition that institutional character itself is constituted through the enactment of documents, signatures and relationships. Rather than parodying a lack of institutional authority, these documents are a form of record-performance that experimentally reassembles the conditions under which authority is produced. They demonstrate how the boundary between the accredited and the unaccredited can move according to the ways social trust is constructed.

Within this structural experiment, Kitchen Notes foregrounds the material and social qualities of food. The series of cross-section drawings of gaedureup bread and sourdough bread on the gallery wall provides a representative example. The drawings show life-size sections of loaves made during the artist’s baking practice. Attending to the relationships within a bread-making process carried out by machines operated through computer programs, Fong relates bread’s contrasting associations with programmed production, warmth and hospitality to meticulously delineated drawings. Beyond simple representation, these works function as a visual language that translates food’s material structure into a metaphor for social and institutional order. They reveal that making a living and giving things visual form do not occupy separate realms. Alongside the drawings, wall texts listing bread ingredients and preparation processes recall the schematic charts and graphs that Fong has long used as installation devices. Just as the SAD project presented “how to become a successful artist” through diagrams and statistical graphs, he repeatedly makes institutional structures unfamiliar by visualising language and numbers. In Kitchen Notes, the arrangement of wall texts, drawings, worktops and tools evokes a laboratory or research institute, explicitly showing the process through which food becomes a subject of artistic experimentation.

In preparing the exhibition, Fong’s research involved approaching craftspeople he did not know, learning production processes directly from them, and practising those processes himself. This desire to learn firsthand confirms that his intention lies beyond simply reproducing dishes. It centres on acquiring local knowledge and traditional skills through the body and translating them into the exhibition space. Such “learning by hand” demonstrates how art can connect with social experience through labour, learning and care, rather than remaining an autonomous act of creation. Another important recipe he introduces is the egg tart. Baking this familiar Hong Kong snack and tourist favourite is a gesture that intersects his identity as a Hong Kong-born artist living in Korea with the context of place. The egg tart carries traces of the colonial period while also functioning as an everyday dessert representative of Hong Kong today. By bringing it into the Korean context of Gangneung, Fong reveals the movement of identity and the transfer of memories of place. If making bread and sausages serves to explore locality and labour, the egg tart instead calls upon his own cultural origins. Encountering a Hong Kong dessert in a gallery in Gangneung, viewers experience the multiple layers through which place and identity intersect.

The exhibition also includes SAD Kitchen Chef Kits, which reproduce egg tarts, sausages and bread through imitation meal-kit packaging, large posters and logo branding. Appearing to be consumable products, these packages condense the compressive logic of contemporary capitalist consumption. Meal kits presuppose the speed of immediate preparation and consumption, sealing labour and time within a commodified package. Although their glossy printed surfaces resemble commercial products, Fong also reflects on the disappearance of home cooking in Korean society. He focuses on contemporary anxieties about “cooking from scratch” and the convenience of the meal-kit industry that has emerged in response. Every box was printed and folded by the artist, and each ingredient was individually sorted and packaged by hand. The finished products are therefore not factory-produced goods but surfaces of labour made through the artist’s hands.

In this way, the exhibition reveals both continuity and transformation in Fong’s work. He still draws viewers into the contradictions of institutional structures through fictional institutions and participatory devices. Here, however, food allows him to interweave the conditions of life, labour, consumption and identity on multiple levels. Art no longer remains solely within institutional critique. It expands into a device for testing the possibilities of new social relationships through concrete actions and sensations of living. Ultimately, Fong’s acts of baking bread, making sausages, and preparing and sharing egg tarts ask whether art, through the memories of a migrant, can become a means of experimenting with and reconfiguring the conditions of life. They invite us to reconsider the boundary between life and art itself.