Misong Kim

Food is more than just nourishment for Elia Nurvista: the ingredients in what we eat offer a way of understanding complex geopolitical ecosystems and socioeconomic inequality. The Indonesian artist’s 2021 video installation The Maladies, for example, critiques the colonial histories and ecological impact of monocultural crops (in this case the banana), while her ongoing project Sucker Zucker (2016–present) explores the parallels between sugar production and gemstone mining.

“It’s crazy how many things you can do with the potato,” Aki Sasamoto says. While attending a boarding school in Wales during the mid-1990s, she was struck by the endless formal permutations of the vegetable in the canteen food. “Every day there was a different form of potato: mashed potato, fried potato, jacket potato, the curly one, a latke-like thing…” She laughs.

Phillips Hong Kong will bring some of the world’s biggest artists to its two modern and contemporary evening sales on 29 March, coinciding with both Hong Kong Art Week and Art Basel Hong Kong. A highlight of the evening sale will be Yayoi Kusama’s acrylic-on-canvas work, Sunset Afterglow Inside My Heart (2020).