Beyond Bitter

Bitterness is one of five essential flavours in traditional Chinese cuisine, along with salty, spicy, sour, and sweet. Each is regarded as necessary for achieving balance in the body and on the palette. With the goal of creating five corresponding bodies of work for each flavour, Beyond Bitter is Karen Kar Yen Law’s most recent exploration of diasporic identity and intergenerational relationships through the language of Chinese cooking.

In this body of work, Law uses airbrushing, screen printing, painting, and collage to construct dynamic abstract compositions. She builds up the images in layers, applying her materials between coats of resin, suspending them beneath glossy surfaces. Crinkly motifs derived from the skin of a bitter melon repeat throughout the series as positive and negative shapes. Like a good cook, Law repurposes stencils of the bitter melon skin from other printmaking projects to extract all the flavour from her ingredients with inventive curiosity, applying her used stencils and cutouts on top of new screen-printed forms.

The exhibition is inspired by Law’s observation that Chinese immigrants tend to swallow, rather than express, feelings of bitterness. Just as one might treat bitter melons in the kitchen, she considers the possibility of tending to bitter pain or truth interpersonally by devising methods that alleviate what is undesirable and draw out what is pleasurable. However, bitterness also arises in response to socio-cultural circumstances. Fraught with exploitation, exclusion, and racism, the history of Asian immigration in Canada has led to justifiable bitterness in a vast diasporic community. These are conditions that should not be ignored or accepted. Discerning the complex layers of bitterness in the Chinese diaspora, as she has experienced it, Law strives to imagine new recipes that value what bitterness has to offer and release what is beyond bitter and just gone bad.

Curated by Hannah Keating