I don’t really see what I do as an artistic practice. There are no limits or limits. All the ways I fill a day — even if I don’t do anything at all — are one and the same. I don’t have a studio. I don’t wake up and go to a place where I sit and make things. I just do what I need or want to do, and in the process I think about different possible works. Everything informs everything else.
For the past six years I’ve taught a class at Columbia University called Making Without Objects. Technically it’s an advanced undergraduate course in sculpture, but we don’t really produce anything. I always look at what is going on in the world in general and try to imagine how a young artist might experience that. The students made videos for YouTube. We have done projects on Instagram. I once rented a piece of land in the virtual reality game Second Life and had everyone build a sculpture there. I encourage the students to think conceptually and create things in their heads, more than in a material sense. The class name should have been How Not to Do Anything, but the university said it contradicted the idea of going to college.
Food has addressed a lot in my work—I practically grew up in my grandmother’s kitchen in Thailand—so I taught for a number of years in the kitchen of gallery owner Gavin Brown’s home in Harlem. In this photo, I teach my students in his former exhibition space on West 127th Street, which closed in 2020, in a kitchen he built in part for this purpose. Every year I show the class a few recipes, and here we cook pad Thai, a noodle dish, and also the name of a 1990 piece of mine serving food to visitors at the Paula Allen Gallery in New York.
As I mixed the sauce and stir-fry the noodles, I explained to the students all the different elements that went into that work—the different influences and layers that could be easily overlooked. For example, I used an electric wok for the original piece because I had seen one in a video by the artist Martha Rosler and took that as a source of inspiration. And the meal was based on a recipe by an American woman, in the 1970s or early 1980s, who replaced ketchup with tamarind paste because pad Thai was not well known in the United States at the time. When I was making the work, I was very interested in giving post-colonial criticism. There is a method in the West of isolating objects from other cultures, putting them in boxes in museums, and studying them out of context, which to me misses the point completely. In contrast, enjoying a meal is a way to really relate to and understand the other person, to share time, space and food. Today I don’t draw a line between the cooking I do for work and the food preparation I do at home to feed my partner and me. Cooking, working and teaching are all just living.
This interview has been edited and abridged.