FOODSCAPE, a New Chapter, at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, 2004

 FOODSCAPE, a New Chapter, at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, 2004
The Language of Fruits and Vegetables

The FOODSCAPE project returned to Hong Kong in 2004, presented at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum after exhibitions in several cities. This new chapter was quite different from the earlier editions, both in content and presentation. The exhibition occupied a much larger space than the gallery settings of the previous chapters, allowing the project to develop in a more expansive way.

For this special edition, Leung Ping-kwan and Lee Ka-sing discussed inviting a guest artist to participate. Ping-kwan suggested Millie Chen, a Canadian artist whom he knew personally. Chen, whose practice encompasses installation and sound, was invited to create a work specifically for the exhibition. The choice proved to be an inspired one. Millie spent a month in Hong Kong preparing for the exhibition, including making recordings of readings of Ping-kwan’s poetry. In the exhibition space, she adapted the concept of the Hong Kong traditional food stall, the Dai Pai Dong (大排檔), as the setting for her installation.

Ka-sing, meanwhile, chose not to present an existing work from the FOODSCAPE series. Instead, he approached the project in a more minimal way, selecting one of Ping-kwan’s poems and creating an artist’s book from it. The Language of Fruits and Vegetables was made in this context.

The book measured 5.5 × 5.5 inches and contained 288 pages. Its neon-pink cover gave it the appearance of a small, solid object, almost like a brick. With funding from the museum, 500 copies were printed. A cornered bookshelf was constructed at the entrance to the exhibition space, where visitors could take a copy while walking through the exhibition and return it when leaving.

The neon pink of the cover was chosen, as Ka-sing later explained, partly for its visibility: the “artwork” would become visible in the hands of each visitor. In this sense, every visitor became, in some way, a participant in the work.

After the exhibition, Ka-sing left the 500 displayed copies with the museum. He subsequently financed the printing of an additional 252 numbered editions himself, considering the book to be the final medium through which the work should exist. The number 252 also referred to the 252 photographs used in the book.

Looking back today, The Language of Fruits and Vegetables can be seen as a milestone in Ka-sing’s practice, with an influence that extends through much of the work that followed. It was his first work conceived and produced in the form of a book. In recent years, his photographic works have increasingly taken book form; for some works, he has decided not to produce individual photographic prints at all, choosing the book as the final form of presentation.

The work was also an early and significant example of Ka-sing’s use of sequence: a work that exists through a serial arrangement of images, with the order of reading becoming an essential part of the work itself. Later works such as CODA (Op.64, 2020) and fly-in-love (Op.82, 2023) are more fully developed examples of this approach.

The photographs in The Language of Fruits and Vegetables were drawn from dot-hong-kong 香港點 (Op.22, 2003), a series of images rephotographed from Ka-sing’s archive of snapshots made over the preceding decades. In this sense, the images were already a form of looking back: a return to traces of his own personal history.

In 2003, Sabrina Fung curated A Number of Things about Hong Kong, a three-person exhibition at the City University gallery, with works by anothermountainman, Leung Ping-kwan and Lee Ka-sing. Ka-sing presented photographs from dot-hong-kong as a projection that changed randomly while being activated through an internet channel. The Language of Fruits and Vegetables extended this earlier work, transforming it into a much larger sequence and fixing the images into a predetermined order.

The book is therefore more than a collection of photographs. Through the act of rephotographing his own archive, Ka-sing’s looking back gradually opens onto the social environments, projects, friendships and people that had passed through his life over the years. This approach returns in his recent work moment / memory 記憶對焦  (Op.90, 2026–), in which he rephotographs an archive of his negatives and presents them in their original negative form, sequenced through a fictional structure.

The Language of Fruits and Vegetables was made in 2004, during a period when Lee and his family had moved to a new city. They moved to Toronto in September 1997—not as an escape, but with the original intention of extending what they had established in Hong Kong in promoting photography. Their former studio at Prince Terrace, which had been a gathering place for photographers and artists, was transformed after their relocation into a photography gallery, and later incorporated the newly established NuNaHeDuo Centre of Photography, with partial funding from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Due to certain circumstances, an unexpected change in the gallery’s set-up in Hong Kong greatly affected the original plan for the gallery in Toronto, which had initially been conceived in parallel with their activities in Hong Kong.

The work is not a single-directional narrative. It contains many layers of reference—people, events, places, personal histories and abstract elements—interwoven with the photographs. For someone unfamiliar with the background, many of these references may remain unseen. But perhaps a work does not need to reveal every one of its details to every viewer. Each person brings their own experience and perception to it. The more one knows of the stories behind the images, however, the more one may discover.

Ka-sing recalls a conversation with Ping-kwan in which the poet mentioned that he could recognize many of the references in the book. Ping-kwan, of course, knew well the stories and circumstances behind Ka-sing’s work. As Ping-kwan’s words on the page were placed alongside Ka-sing’s images, some of these references came together unexpectedly. In that juxtaposition, subtle meanings began to appear.

From its beginning, the FOODSCAPE project was never simply about food. Food became a way of speaking about identity, place, immigration and dislocation. The Language of Fruits and Vegetables is no exception.

The photographic work is based on “Green Salad,” a poem Ping-kwan wrote in 1988. In the poem, he wrote, “One forks up tufts of tangled knots, bitter leaves / mingled with lean red strips and fat green things.” Ping-kwan wrote about food as he understood it: it holds its own aesthetics and values, linking our prejudices and desires. “Green Salad,” translated into English by Gordon T. Osing, was published bilingually in City at the End of Time in 1992. Ka-sing created the image for the cover of that book.

At the Heritage Museum exhibition, Ka-sing’s contribution extended beyond the installation of the 500 copies of The Language of Fruits and Vegetables. On a long wall, he presented an essay on his collaboration with Ping-kwan, illustrated with original works placed in frames and embedded within the text. Written in Chinese, the essay was titled:

文字山水食桌靈光，空景近景
（梁秉鈞和李家昇，關於詩和攝影的合作過程，食事地域誌及其他）
The essay was subsequently published in Photo Pictorial, issue 468, July 2004.

For this issue of ARCHIVE, we reprint a complete edition of The Language of Fruits and Vegetables, in a smaller-format version. More than two decades have passed since the work was made. During the transition from analogue to digital media, the original files of the book and its images have become dislocated, and some may have been lost.