Twardzik Ching Chor Leng

2023, Ching, Chor Leng

This paper will journey through the discourses that student teachers had while attending Let’s Chat, a performance by Amanda Heng and will analyze their reactions towards her artwork. Let’s Chat uses a mundane everyday activity, the plucking of beansprouts, often a gendered household activity, to gather together viewers/participants/strangers from all backgrounds in order to illicit casual conversations. According to Ortner (Woman, culture, and society, Stanford University Press, 1974), the perception of women’s work in the domestic arena as lower-level work in the overwhelming majority of societies perpetuates “the underlying logic that assumes the inferiority of women” (80). In the Southeast Asian context, such perception is still prevalent. Heng in Let’s Chat ‘raises’ the status of food preparation to that of artwork which resulted in discourses on art, life and gender politics. These conversations capture diverse opinions and present ‘chatting’, a non-confrontational, ‘fleeting, mundane or immediate’ conversation as a site for embracing and sustaining cultural transformation.