Jenny (Yiping) Zhang

For us, to share explored ideas of home via food, spice, and the in-between space of translation with students from the Bosco Centre in Rotherhithe. The group all called Southwark home at the time of the workshops, including refugees, migrants, asylum seekers and local residents. They came together to share stories, recipes and food. Working with artist Saima Rasheed and mother tongues, a local and global multidisciplinary collective, over four workshops, they explored local history archives at John Harvard Library in Southwark, painted with herbs and spices, and translated their own recipes of home through multiple forms of media to create a visual recipe book that brings many different cultures into one place. The book was launched at Southwark Park Galleries on Saturday 7th May in a recipe sharing that acted as a call and response from one community to another.

This project was conceived and delivered at a moment when migration and community displacement was on the rise with policies demeaning those who travel to the UK for a better life becoming ever more severe. Situated in and responding to current global affairs, For us, to share sought to celebrate the many similarities and differences found in culture, memory and language. Ultimately, the group's lived experience is a microcosm of what is happening on a global scale.

The memory of their own food or their favourite meals became the translation. Transcending language barriers, everybody was able to communicate through their own recipes and visuals. Reclaiming the stickiness of communication through acts of painting, collaging, eating and drawing.

For us, to share is constant, the project can continue to develop with your contribution. Food is a tangible history passed through hands and oceans; this book is a message to the relationship we all have with places and people.

The students, artists and curators have given permission for their stories and recipes to be shared. We encouraged participants at the sharing to add their own recipes and continue to share this book, enabling their food to travel beyond your home.

The book can be found at The British Library, Canada Water Library, Camberwell Library, Walworth Library and currently in exhibition Southwark Today at Southwark Heritage Centre from 6 June 2022 until June 2023, curated by Syrup.

A link to the digital PDF can be found below.

Recipe book design by Jennifer Whitworth

Printed by ME PRINT

For us, to share, curated by students from the Royal College of Art MA Curating Contemporary Art, is a part of 2022 Graduate Projects in partnership with Southwark Park Galleries. For us, to share was created in collaboration with the Bosco Centre, Saima Rasheed and mother tongues.

Jenny (Yiping) Zhang is an emerging curator based in Tkaronto, Canada. Zhang has always been seeing her curatorial practices as a magnifying glass examining the unseen and unnoticed notions of our time. A platform that opens up impactful dialogues to provide care and comfort. Her previous life experiences of re-rooting in different foreign lands are often used as her first-hand reference for her research; Zhang’s past projects had been focusing on the importance of the yearning for belonging, among diasporic communities in Tkaronto, Canada. This topic is something not acknowledged frequently, but embodies a significance, through direct and indirect influences on social change and public health issues.

Her graduate dissertation research focused on how eat art situates in institutional spaces, and how it intrudes its surrounding environment and disturbs the audience's institutional formal behaviour, which ultimately reduces the threshold fear among visitors. This direction started from her interest in how different forms of socially engaged practices challenge the standardized institutional environment and lead to more possibilities for community engagement. Zhang is interested in introducing art to non-arts audience groups and making art more accessible and approachable.

For her graduate project, Zhang co-curated For us, to share, a community-based public programme partnering with Southwark Park Galleries. The project invited artists and collectives to collaborate with ESOL students from a local charity based in Rotherhithe, The Bosco Centre, co-created a series of artworks and a recipe book exploring the idea of home through food, spice, and in-between spaces of translation.

As a curator, Jenny Zhang is aware of the existing hierarchy in the production of art projects, she aims to always provide more opportunities and full support to emerging artists and art practitioners. For her future career, she is looking forward to curating more engaging and experimental curatorial projects to discuss crucial social issues.