Wok Palace 88

Abstract

“Wok Palace 88,” is a parafictional and defunct Chinese-American restaurant brought back to life through the institutional process of excavating, archiving, and displaying. The restaurant is based around shutdown restaurants in Greater Boston including Eldo Cake House and Joyce Chen’s restaurants. Wok Palace 88 consists of two performances: the first titled “A Delivery” where I biked around the greater-Boston area delivering menus to spaces that once housed Chinese restaurants. The second performance titled “A Soft Grand Opening” is the grand opening of the fictional restaurant where I presented and archived fabricated artifacts from the restaurant, as well as embodied the histories ingrained in the objects. I served as the artist, archivist, curator, historian, collector, and subject. These performances were acts of resistance against American Orientalism and engaged with moments and artifacts related to the restaurant and its experience.

The project asks what it means to embed time, memory, and place into an object; and consequently how are they valued and commodified? It approaches these questions with the historical implications associated with each item, such as the mystical origins of the chop suey. It is a provocation on what it means to archive and institutionalize cultural objects, how histories connected to material bodies are told, and ultimately the futility of preservation.

The performances were an interrogation into the Eurocentric fetishization and hoarding of Chinese material goods. It asks us to reckon with the exoticization of Asian culture and unrecognition of Asian American art. Consequently, it will investigate what it means to archive and institutionalize cultural objects. Wok Palace 88 is positioned as a defunct restaurant because of the impossibility of the defunct to generate futures. It is because it’s defunct that we must begin to excavate and uncover histories.