Bread Whispers · Naha, Okinawa · 2024 Learning baguette making at La Boulangerie Le Prêt à Porter
In Naha, I continued Bread Whispers by learning to make baguettes at La Boulangerie Le Prêt à Porter. The encounter extends the project’s exchanges with bakers beyond Gwangju and Frankfurt, following practical knowledge from one kitchen and place to another.
With the baker in Naha, Okinawa, December 2024.
A record of the exchange
I designed and made the certificate myself, then asked the baker at La Boulangerie Le Prêt à Porter who taught me baguette-making to sign it. Dated 16 December 2024, it records the skill and the learning exchange.
Certificate designed and made by Silas Fong, signed by the baker who taught him baguette-making, 16 December 2024.
Bread Whispers · Frankfurt · 2024 Learning sourdough rye bread at the Städelschule canteen
After beginning Bread Whispers in Gwangju, I continued the project in Frankfurt by learning to make sourdough rye bread with Hocine Bouhlou, head chef of the Städelschule canteen. The exchange brought an art school into view through its kitchen and the practical knowledge of the people who feed it.
With the chefs at Städelschule, Frankfurt, 2024.
I designed and made this certificate. The head chef at the Städelschule canteen, who taught me sourdough rye bread-making, signed it as a record of the learning exchange.
Sourdough rye bread from the learning exchange.
Learning and hospitality
My wife and son joined me for a lunch prepared by Hocine Bouhlou. Their presence is part of this chapter’s account of learning and hospitality: the exchange took place not only at the oven, but also around a shared table.
With Hocine Bouhlou, my wife and my son at a lunch he prepared, Frankfurt, July 2024.
The artist-made certificate, signed by the chef who taught me, makes the learning relationship visible. Within Bread Whispers, it connects the practical work of baking with questions about how learning is recognised and valued.
2023–ongoing · Bread-making, exchanges, performance, photographs and publications
Bread Whispers develops through learning to bake and sharing what I make. Beginning in Gwangju, exchanges with bakers became a way to enter unfamiliar places through practical work. Repeated trials, signed records of learning, meals and conversations connect the chapters.
Across Bread Whispers, I design and make the certificates myself. Each is signed by the chef or artisan who taught me the respective skill, recording the learning relationship and the knowledge shared.
Each place has its own circumstances. The pages below follow those encounters separately, while keeping the continuing project visible.
What can learning to make bread teach me about a place? In Yangpyeong, experiments with Korean-grown wheat became a way to meet farmers, cooks and neighbours. The work follows the connections between growing, making and sharing food, and the ordinary meals through which those encounters continue.
Sharing bread with the elders of Obin-ri, 30 July 2026. My son joined the gathering.
Learning through encounters
After first receiving a sourdough starter in Gwangju in 2023, feeding it became part of feeding my family. In Yangpyeong I wanted to understand more about the flour itself. An enquiry to a local mill did not lead to a meeting; other introductions opened a different route through the area.
Chef Hannah Uhm introduced me to Team Farm Tuesday. On 28 July, I joined the group in harvesting, sorting and packing vegetables, and sharing food. A visit to the Museum of Silhak on the same day became another occasion to listen and learn.
With Team Farm Tuesday, Yangpyeong, 28 July 2026.Listening at the Museum of Silhak, 28 July 2026.
Trials in dough and jam
I repeatedly tested a soft sourdough pain de mie using Korean-grown wheat, rye and whole-wheat flour. Thinking about the elders who would eat it shaped decisions about texture, thin slices and the jam served alongside it. Blueberry jam was chosen after further trials.
A baking trial: the loaf grew beyond its tin.The windowpane test: stretching the dough to examine its structure.
Making jam left marks of stirring and scraping inside the pot.
What carries on
Near the end of the residency, a visit to Oihari through a friend of my wife brought my son into a cucumber greenhouse and onto a tractor. Back at home, the bread returned to the daily table. The photographs follow these small continuations rather than treating the residency as a finished result.
The next slice: bread returns to ordinary meals.
With thanks to Team Seohwa, the elders of Obin-ri, Chef Hannah Uhm, Team Farm Tuesday, the hosts in Oihari, Hye Kyoung Kwon and Jiho Fong.
한국어 · 빵소리: 밀 배우기
반죽을 다루고, 함께 일하고, 빵을 나누며 양평의 사람들과 장소를 만났다. 그곳에서의 배움은 집으로 돌아온 뒤에도 일상의 식탁과 놀이로 이어졌다.
Solo Exhibition at Oi!, Hong Kong, 1 Sep 2023 – 7 Jan 2024
In my recent project “SAD Kitchen: Oi! Guide – A Comfort Food Journey,” I utilized 3D printed objects, 3D scanning, animation, wall vinyl, printed matters and installation art to transform the Oi! Warehouse into a multi-sensory “kitchen.” This interactive space invites visitors to explore personal emotions and communal bonds through a site-specific game. Hidden psychological test questions were integrated into the 3D objects and animated features, encouraging self-reflection. Visitors received a personalized “Comfort Food Guide,” pointing them to local dishes in the North Point community. My art aims to use food—and digital media—as vehicles for social and cultural construction, connecting people, places, and stories.
Coordinator. Vanessa Lai
Coordinator in Korea. Hye Kyoung Kwon
Graphic Design & Art Direction. Heesun Seo, Chris Chan @ Studio Hik
Art Technician. Damon Lee, Ting Lap Tak, Tse Chun Sing, Xiao Wen Yan, Yip Kin Bon
Solo exhibition · Gallery Chosun, Seoul 6–29 November 2024
Department of Bread turns a school’s promise of training into a question about who defines achievement. Bread-making becomes a way to examine the demands placed on artists: credentials, assessments and externally approved results can take priority over curiosity, creativity and learning.
The fictional SAD school began in 2019. This department draws on my experience as both artist and educator, using familiar exercises and institutional language to make those pressures tangible.
Exercises in validation
Flourglass asks participants to practise an unnecessary skill, exposing how arbitrary a test of achievement can be. Shape and Score Clinic directs attention towards precision and prescribed standards, questioning what gets lost when conformity becomes the measure of learning.
In Stretch, ordinary bread-making gestures become exaggerated poses. Their extravagance echoes the spectacle through which institutions present their authority.
These exercises leave room for failure against an external standard. They ask whether participation, persistence and the desire to learn can matter even when they do not produce a certificate or a successful result.
FUSE Artist Residency: Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
Supported by Hong Kong Arts Development Council
at Videotage, Hong Kong
2 Feb – 11 Mar 2018
‘Through slow-moving videos, images, and objects that are oft missed, Fong creates an encounter with the everyday in a controlled environment to allow the visitor to be with the urban in a different way. Many of the images are personal to Fong, and he brings in three textual perspectives (including this one) to obscure this narrative of his memories, opening them up to be shared. Bringing in media art theory into more traditional image-making practices, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening employs a light touch in a grand gesture toward a place where we can choose to be still.’
– Excerpt from Hera Chan’s text, The Freedom To Be Still
At the entrance, visitor picks up one of the catalogues and misses out the two others which look seemingly identical. In fact, each catalogue contains a different text that guides the visitor to an alternative experience of the same exhibition.
參觀者在展覽入口拿起其中一本場刊，錯過了貌似完全相同的另外兩本。 實際上 ， 每本場刊內有不同的文本，引導觀眾在同一個展覽裏經歷不同的體驗。
Digital print on paper, A5, 32 pages, 3 in a set, 2018
紙上數碼打印, A5, 32 頁, 3本1組, 2018
Dye sublimation print on voile, 140 cm x 260 cm, 2 in a set, 2018
透明紗上熱昇華印刷, 140 米 x 260 厘米, 2件1組, 2018
Solo Exhibition
Hong-ti Art Center, Busan
25 Nov 2016– 16 Dec 2016
Artist Statement
Time is always not enough, but it is only true when we have things to do. Artist residency is an experience of time travel. Once you step into another culture, far away from your own. Suddenly you realize that you have to learn from the very beginning, from the basic understanding of daily life. It recalls memories of childhood, of youth and of future. Nothing is necessary to be done. Just stay in the studio, which is very spacious compared to that I had in Hong Kong, allows a lot of solitary thought to fill up until your back feel painful with the chair. The spacetime is open. ‘Time is an illusion.’ – Albert Einstein
After arriving Busan for a month, mostly I stay in the area nearby Hong-ti Art Center. It is an industrial area where things are made. There is not much traffic. In a foreign place, most fundamental elements become sentiments. The air, the light and shadows, the sea, the ambient sound, the fallen leaves and the sense of time seems dilated. To start from a personal perspective, I couldn’t help but reflect on my life in Hong Kong. I hope to describe the feeling of living here from Hong Kong.
One touristic attraction in my studio is definitely the sunlight. Here I could see the same ‘light drawing’ on the wall and the floor from 8am to 3:30pm in my studio. Outside there are different trees and plants filling up the window scene. It is somehow rare in Hong Kong, at least in my neighbourhood. It might sound awkward to you, but the residential life in Hong Kong are mostly in a high-rise, far off the ground. Still, the windows are blocked by the other buildings so you hardly see ‘light drawing’ on the walls and shadows of trees in your flat.
The sense of timelessness may not be a thing of Busan, but certainly for me in Hong-ti.
2016- Installation
Direct UV inkjet print on roller blind, inkjet print mounted on translucent black acrylic plates
200 x 140 cm; 180 x 90 cm, 90 x 90 cm (2 pcs)
The room I lived was on the first floor of a building in a small quiet street. It was surrounded by towering trees with not much traffic. In winter, snow covered the trees and the roofs of the houses. In summer, the flourishing leaves almost pushed their way into the window. Sunlight fell into my room, casting on my table a blue and greenish shadow, swayed gently with the wind.
The room I live is on the sixth floor of a high rise in an estate made up of ten blocks. The view from the window stays the same throughout the year. Tall concrete penetrates the hazy sky. In the small slit of the harbour view, I can see ships passing by. Sunlight also comes into my room, but it looks quite different. It is just the reflection from a window of the building opposite.
One day I walked around the streets alone. I looked at people’s faces, but few looked back at me. They weren’t even aware. They don’t look around now. They may well be living a second life in another space and time. At some point I walked pass a tree and realised there was a big sky high above the black mirror.
Exhibited in POST PiXEL. Animamix Biennale 2015 – 16, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, Hong Kong
椴樹底下
2016- 裝置
捲簾上UV噴墨打印, 透光黑色亞加力膠片上噴墨打印 200 x 140 厘米; 180 x 90 厘米, 90 x 90 厘米 (2 件)
