Food as Material History: Everyday Ingredients as Political Carriers

For Chuyia Chia, food serves as a political and historical substance even before it appears in her performances. She affirms that, “Material for me is very important. It is a statement in itself. So the history of the material you are using, it tells the whole story.” Her process begins with the understanding that ingredients are embedded within systems of land use, labour, belief, and class relations. She selects materials through personal proximity, using direct experience with food to reveal its broader social roles. Food is therefore never neutral; it carries memory, identity, agriculture, and ideology prior to any artistic intervention. Following the three interrelated trajectories in Chia’s practice: geography, where food is shaped by land and upbringing; soybeans, which reveal the entanglement of global agriculture and biopolitics; and material case studies such as leeks, which register class and fragility. These strands show that her performances do not assign meaning to materials; instead, they bring into visibility the political conditions already inscribed within them.

Geography

This sensitivity to origin is grounded in Chia’s upbringing in Selangor, Malaysia, where she lived in a fishing village structured by self-sufficiency. Food was not decorative but essential, where both sustenance and identity were. Daily life involved cultivating vegetables and fishing directly from the surrounding environment, embedding food production within routine labour. Fish were cleaned and processed by hand, and vegetables were grown locally, while even childhood play drew from shells and leaves gathered nearby. In this context, food functioned as infrastructure, shaped by scarcity, labour, and communal reliance on land and water. Later, while living in Sweden, Chia encountered a different relationship to food, where one was framed as an ecological choice rather than a necessity. Community gardening plots, forest culture, and rainwater collection reflected a society oriented towards sustainability as a conscious practice. This contrast sharpened her understanding that food always reflects how a community relates to land: whether through subsistence, industrialisation, or ecological awareness. These geographic conditions become foundational in her work, in which ingredients are treated as carriers of place-based histories rather than as neutral materials.

Soybean and GMO

Soybean begins as memory before it becomes politics. Chia describes how soy-based foods, such as soy sauce, soybean sprouts, and tofu, were everyday staples in her upbringing. Growing up with her grandmother, who observed a monthly vegetarian diet, soy became a recurring source of nourishment. Through this repetition, soybean was not simply an ingredient but part of a lived routine, embedded in cultural practice, care, and proximity to the body. This familiarity later shifts when she becomes aware of the industrial conditions surrounding soybean production. She notes that a vast majority of global soybean crops are genetically modified, raising concerns about how such interventions might affect the body, particularly in relation to pesticide traces such as glyphosate found in everyday food products (Chia, interview transcript). While regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration maintain that approved GMO crops are safe for consumption (FDA, 2024), ongoing debate persists over their long-term ecological and health effects. For Chia, this tension is not resolved scientifically but experienced bodily, prompting what she describes as a sense of unease, questioning whether what is consumed daily might “bring consequences to our body.” Rather than developing into a singular artwork, soybean reveals how Chia approaches food as material. It demonstrates her tendency to begin with ingredients that are culturally familiar and geographically grounded, before tracing their transformation through larger agricultural and industrial systems. Here, food becomes a site where domestic memory, urban consumption, and global production intersect, collapsing the distance between land and body. This framework, focusing on proximity to awareness, to material investigation, extends into her performance practice. While soybean itself remains a conceptual anchor, it informs how she later works with other ingredients, such as leeks, where these concerns become materially and visually articulated through processes of handling, transformation, and decay.