Jasmine Yeh

Jasmine Yeh is an interdisciplinary artist from Taiwan based in NYC. Through the language of food and the act of cooking, they are seeking answers to questions of immigrant and diaspora identity, birthright, and self-appropriation. Using performance, installation, and social practice, they hope to create recipes to fuel and nourish social justice activism through an intersectional lens as a queer, non-binary, 1.75 generation immigrant.

Yeh writes about their artistic practice :

Among my current project goals is a memento mori sculptural installation and performance using kombucha SCOBY and sourdough starter cultures as an investigation of the human body, legacy, and the structures of family and community. The aftermath of my recent diagnosis and treatment for cancer has led me to expand and redefine my understanding of bodies. Feeling the fragility and mortality of my physical self, I became hypervigilant in the care and growth of my kombucha SCOBY and sourdough cultures. Strong, viable “mother” cultures can be divided into multiple new samples, which can then be passed on to other homes. This method has been utilized for millennia to share “mother” cultures, with many home bakers and homebrewers using “mother” cultures that have been passed down through generations. Wild yeast on a baker or brewer’s hands would often be naturally incorporated into the culture, making each culture unique to who has handled it. My confrontation with my own physical ephemerality drove me to propagate more and more “mother” cultures in hopes of leaving behind “bodies” that would outlive me. Does legacy erase the individual? Where are the lines drawn between legacy in the face of violent colonial histories and the lived realities of inherited trauma? If given the opportunity, these questions are the start of a vast tangle of inquiries I wish to chase down during my time at Spruce. With these concepts as my wild yeast, I aim to brew a delicious, multi-dimensional sculptural installation and performance.