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Text: Xiaotong

Brandon Chan is going to be a food specimen house about Tai Sang Wai. When I first arrived at Tai Shengwei, I had the impression that every household was making food at home, such as drying salted fish and peels, and many villagers were growing vegetables. In short, everyone has their own way of handling food. Villagers also use the fruits of fruit trees to make wine. He gets along with the villagers a lot and hears more stories about food, and these stories make him feel that the "eating process" of nature is interlinked. People connect fish and fish connect birds. He hopes to solidify the process of "eating". How about making the food into specimens, and then using the specimens to tell the story of the food in this village?

When he first entered the village, he didn't plan in advance what works he would do at the art festival, because he didn't want to bring an idea into the village purely, and then leave after finishing the idea. He feels that "residential" is far more important than "creation", so we must first get to know the villagers and feel the countryside well.

He still remembered his first impression of Tai Sang Wai, that he saw a lot of food: fish in the fish pond, grass by the fish pond, bread crumbs for feeding the fish, etc. There were also different fruit trees planted next to the fish pond, and some came to eat it. Birds with fish.

Since October, he has come to the village after he gets off work every Friday night. Although on the whole, he has not lived in the village for a long time, but through the food, he has learned some interesting stories of the villagers, such as a certain villager on the side of the road. Some grasses can be used as medicine-medicine, but also a kind of food.

He also remembered that when the fisherman Aunt Lan cooked the pork soup, he chopped the pork very finely. It was different from the soup in his house where a large piece of pork was put into the soup. The handling of pork in this way had some ideas behind Aunt Lan. His neighbor, Cheng Ge, a villager, took great care of him, and when he saw that he didn't have a refrigerator, he borrowed one from him. When he planted mustard greens, he would also pick them off and teach him how to pickle the mustard greens into sauerkraut. Cheng's approach is different from what he usually sees in the city. In cooking, the uniqueness of each person is hidden.

Every evening, every household is cooking. When he walks in a straight alley, he always smells what every household is cooking, and he cooks the rice by himself, but Aunt Lan will take some of the soup when he cooks the soup. Give it to him. When the grown-up brother sees that he has no vegetables to eat, he will share a little with the mustard greens he has just harvested. After learning to pickle sauerkraut for a week, Cheng gave him the pickled sauerkraut. He used it to fry beef. When he saw that he only had this little food, he was afraid that he was not full enough, so he harvested one more corn from the farmland for him.

Once, he ate the fish she raised herself at Aunt Lan's house, and left the fish bones as a specimen. Once again, he cooked red bean paste pie in the neighborhood. Brother Cheng also cooked cassava syrup for him to try, and he saved a little more to make a specimen. Because of the specimens, he will remember the stories of these foods.

He still remembered that he walked into Dashengwei the first night, and originally wanted to ask Aunt Lan to get the key and then go to the house in the village, but Aunt Lan forgot to make an appointment with him, and was already out for dinner happily in the afternoon. He had to wait for Aunt Lan in the main alley of the village. It was dusk. After dinner, the villagers felt very nervous when they saw the stranger in the night, and kept asking him what he was here for. It turned out that in Dashengwei, a small population, every family knows each other. Whenever a stranger enters the village, they will communicate with each other. He felt that the neighborhood relationship in this village was simple and close, and at the same time, he reminded himself that he must become a part of this village in the future, and the villagers would no longer be wary of seeing him.

Later, he cooked red bean paste pie neighborhood, just to get to know the villagers more and try to use food to open up the conversation box between people. He observed that the township office at the entrance of the village is a gathering place for villagers. There are many people in the township office after eating at noon and before cooking at six o'clock. If he cooks some food during this time, everyone will be full. Interested in eating, but sugar water is probably always popular. So for the first time, he cooked barley, yuba, eggs and syrup, thinking that everyone would want to eat it, but the old people in the village said barley was "cold" and refused to eat it.

Next time, he cooked red bean peel syrup. This time, the villagers were willing to drink syrup. Brother Cheng also exchanged self-cooked sugar water with him. He bought the red beans into the village outside, and the peels were dried by himself.

Every time he walked into Tai Sang Wai, he collected food, collected stories, dehydrated and dried the food that he planned to make into specimens. There is so much food in Dashengwei. Every time he takes it away in large quantities like a takeaway. When he brings the food back to his studio in the city to make specimens, he still seems to smell the food in Dashengwei.