How to cook Samgyetang

2018, 3:47 min, colour, sound, fromIdentities and Recipes

Concept and realization: Ji Su Kang-Gatto

Production: Academy of Media Arts Cologne

Identities an Recipes: How to cook Samgyetang (Chicken Soup)

Recipes allow us to feel a sense of belonging and safety in a world that often feels chaotic and uncertain. Cooking is a performative act deeply entangled with ideas of home, nourishment, and community. It can be about connection—to stories, cultures, sensations, ingredients and bodies. Through cooking, we can connect with the dead, those waiting to be born and our predecessors who poured their souls into their cooking.

Watching Ji Su Kang-Gatto on my laptop is a form of pleasure and entertainment, and I’m just on the threshold of a rabbit hole. I decided to look for the title of the film How to Cook Samgyetang? on YouTube. Besides Kang-Gatto’s short film, there are many approaches to making Samgyetang or chicken ginseng soup on the platform. I learned about washing and submersion techniques, warming the inner body, summers in Korea, energy and balance restoration, and fighting fire with fire. I indulged my senses, consuming and taking in without moving my index finger from the trackpad.

Following a recipe, as Kang-Gatto does, requires a willingness to be present in the moment. The original recipe blurs as she borrows, appropriates, re-creates, and eats. Following a recipe demonstrates that there is much more to the work of the amateur cook than submissively following the instructions in passive participation. It is possible to practice a way of following that is not reduced to obedience to commands and that even critically questions authority. Instead, following can be initiating.

Creating and performing a recipe for others to follow means leading. But that does not mean that Kang-Gatto is unquestionably deciding. By sharing her videos on YouTube, Kang-Gatto denies the function of definitive authorship, instead offering us a very subjective interpretation of the given recipe. Sharing a recipe with a camera, with an audience, with people she knows and doesn't know, does not emerge as a force of unidirectional authority, just as following does not appear as merely reactive and humble behaviour.

Ultimately, the performative nature of cooking is about more than just food—the connections made and the stories told in the process. It is about how language and movement, both sensual and technical, guide and describe experiences. It is about the power to shape our identities, communities and stories through cooking and sharing food with each other.

We observe, we cook, and we eat. At which point do we embody the recipes, voices and lessons to create our own?

_{Text - Agustina Andreoletti}

Ji Su Kang-Gatto (*1989) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Düsseldorf in 2013 as a master student of Lucy McKenzie. She completed her postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in summer 2021 with her work Vlog 8998 under the supervision of Prof. Matthias Müller, Daniel Burkhardt and Prof. Dr. Lilian Haberer.

Her work has been shown at numerous exhibition venues and film festivals. These include the Sao Paulo International Short Film Festival and the IMAI Foundation at the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf. Kang-Gatto received the Academy Scholarship for Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts Düsseldorf and a working scholarship in South Korea sponsored by the Kunststiftung NRW. Furthermore, the “Experiment” section at the 31st Sao Paulo International Short Film Festival was dedicated to her work Identities and Recipes. She as director of Identities and Recipes was also at the Official Selection / Aviff Cannes Art Film Festival 2021 and won the 3rd Prize.

MOOZ has already shown another episode from Identities and Recipes : How to cook Miyeokguk

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