AROMASCAPE OF SINGAPORE

- olfactory representation of the city -

workshop & installation (2011)

 

Aromascape of Singapore consists of two parts: a workshop and an exhibition.

In May 2009 and March 2010, Ueda conducted a 3-day workshop for Aromascape of Rotterdam at Willem de Kooning Art Academy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.  The workshop format will be adopted for the Singapore version of the project.

What do you smell if you walk around the city of Singapore?  Savoury fragrance from food stands and restaurants, green and fresh scent in a market, salty sea bleezes, or stinking garbage?  Singapore has an international reputation to be the clearnest city in the world.  In this project, participants are going to explore Singapore on the level of smell.

What is it that we are smelling, what does it make you imagine, what does it make you feel? This workshop will deal with these questions through a combination of lectures, hands-on workshops with fieldwork.  The result of the workshop will be used for the exhibition.

Some of the smells are extracted and exhibited. Just like a perfume shop, the visitors are free to touch them, open the bottles and smell them.  They are not perfumes for wearing, but for evoking your emotion and imagination.

[Relationship to Art and Education]

For Aromascape of Singapore, the relationship of the work to the theme can be seen as follows:  the purpose of working with art academy sudents is to raise the awareness for their sense of smell.  As these students will be in their late teens or early 20s, they have the maximum physical capability of smelling, because as you get old you can smell less.  They still have the clear memories from their youth that are attached very much to smell.  It's the perfect mement for them to learn about smell and totally different dimensions will open up in front of them.

 

 

WORKSHOP

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More documentations regarding the workshop

http://scent-lab.blogspot.com/search/label/%5BAROMASCAPE%20OF%20SINGAPORE%5D

 

EXHIBITION

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NO. 1: IXORA FLOWERS (AMARYLLIS SEAH HSUEH TING)

NO. 2: SUGARCANE (BRENDAN POH KAI JIE)

NO. 3: CHEESEBURGER (NG YI HUI MARY ANN)

NO. 4: NEWSPAPER (KANAKO FURUKAWA)

NO. 5: CEMENT (ORANJE)

NO. 6: RICE (AMARYLLIS SEAH HSUEH TING)

NO. 7: INDIAN INCENSE (SHERYL LAW)

NO. 8: BAK KUT TEH (HO BAOXIN)

NO. 9: BARBECUE (MACK ZHI FANG WENDY)

NO.10: CHAR KWAY TEOW (DEVA RAJ)

NO.11: COFFEE (YU DANYA)

NO.12: TAIWAN SAUSAGE (CHUA TIAN LI)

NO.13: GARAM CIGARETTES (HEMA LATA D/O VEERAMOHAN)

 

EXHIBITION DETAILS

5- 16 January 2011 (Mon-Sun 10am - 7pm Fri 10am - 9pm)

Glass Porch, Level 2, Singapore Art Museum

World Premie (Supported by Singapore Art Museum)

as a part of: Fringe Festival @ Singapore

http://www.singaporefringe.com/#/back-to-school/AROMASCAPE-OF-SINGAPORE-

relating workshop: 29 - 30 Dec 2010, 11am - 2pm at Singapore Art Museum

 

FIND THE SCENT OF TULIPS

(OR FIND CONFUSION...) 

permanent installation at Amsterdam Tulip Museum (2012)

 

Put your head in these tulips.  You will notice they smell of various bulbous flowers: Tulip, Hyacinth and Narcissus (Daffodil).  But which one carries the actual scent of tulips?

 

 

 

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Ordered by: Amsterdam Tulip Museum

Concept: Maki Ueda

Realization: Nezu Aymo Architect

Special thanks to Omega Ingredients (www.omegaingredients.co.uk)

THE JUICE OF WAR

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for “The Smell of War” exhibition

 
Title: The Juice of War – Hiroshima and Nagasaki –
 
Year: 2015

When I was a child, my bedroom contained a shelf of my mother’s books and one of these book was about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Inside I found photos of burned and rotten bodies. A field full of bodies that no longer look like bodies. It was in the high summer season so the bodies would quickly rot and flies laid eggs wherever they could.

The photos were so shocking to me that for nights I was afraid to go to sleep.  But I did not dare ask my mother to remove that book from my bedroom because it seemed rude to the victims. As I grew up I peeked into the book again and again, out of curiosity for the atomic bombings, and I realized that I was getting better in dealing with the fear. I ended up sleeping with that book until I left home at the age of 17.
 
I completely forgot about these pictures, but all of sudden, while I was thinking what to show here, I realized that they were the reason why I could not think anything else beside the smell of rotten flesh when I think of “the smell of war”.

In other words, working on this concept was digging into my memories.

Instruction:
Please put your head in a bowl. This smell was manually extracted from the juice of burned and rotten flesh.

 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The prime minister of Vlamish government also enjoyed the work at the opening.
 
 
At: The castle De Loving, Poperinge, Belgium. 

The Smell of War exhibition:
http://www.thesmellofwar.be

Curated by:  Peter de Coupere

 
[making]
 
 
This is a bizarre  story of purchasing meat of 20 euros at a supermarket, and made it rotten till it starts stinking for extracting the smell…  I am a bit ashamed to tell you the whole story but this is the real story behind this work.
 
When the curator Peter de Coupere asked me to participate in the exhibition with the theme of "the smell of war", I could not think of anything else than the smell of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would be the case by most of Japanese.  We grew up with reading the cartoons "Hadashi no gen　はだしのゲン", with full of illustration of burned and rotten corps and maggot. Also it illustrates the bad odor.
 
 
The interface design:
 
 
 
Purchasing the parts for "katrol"
 
 
I sew the acrylic bowl myself because there was no company who could do this... it was quite some work.
 
 
I asked Peter, the organizer, for hanging the bowl with some instructions.
 
In Japan at my atelier: I bought pieces of meat at a local supermarket: checkin and pork, and burned them.
 
 
 
And dried them for 10 days in the sunlight.
 
 
 
 
This is the simulation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was high in the summer time when they got bombed, and the burned corps got rotten quickly.  Flies lay eggs and it stank terribly everywhere.
 
After 5 or 6 days they started to smell like a garbage.  Around the 10th day it started to stink sour, and this was the limit (also for my neighbor...).
 
I extracted a little to check the smell and turned out that it was missing the burned scent, so I burned them extra.
 
 
 
Then sliced them.  My cutting board was suddenly covered with the flies. It was like a horror movie. I couldn't inhale even, so I inhaled the fresh air 10meters away and ran to the cutting board, and repeated this.
 
 
After the extraction, I filterd it, but it also releases smells everywhere... I got headache from it.  If I would have continued this process I would have gotten depressed.
 
 
In my fridge is the extract and beer mixed up…it's safe as long as it's concealed :-)
 
 
 
 

OLFACTORY MEMORY GAME

installation / educational workshop (2010)

Untitled

Untitled

 

[venue] RAM Gallery, Rotterdam

[premier] March 15th, 2015

[exhibition period] 15/03/2015 - 26/04/2015

 

Please make pair with scents.

Just as Kodo, a Japanese olfactory game, I used all woody scents.

Cedarwood
Sandalwood
Styrax
Labdanum
 

 

 

 

 


  

 

 

DINNER FOR THE MUTED SENSES

- a food art workshop for five (or more) senses in a restaurant setup -

workshop / event (2009)

 

It is free of the eyes, ears, nose,
tongue, body and mind;
free of sight, sound, smell, taste,
touch, and any object of mind;
free of sensory realms
including mind-consciousness.

- The Buddhist Heart Sutra -

dinner

 

CONCEPT

A unique food art workshop in a restaurant set-up. Each course is served with an intervention of one of your senses, such as blindfolding, amplifying or muting to enhance your sensitivities and experience new sensations. All in Japanese lacto-ovo vegetarian style prepared with organic ingredients.

The workshop is developed by Maki Ueda, an artist who is known for her artworks focusing on the olfactory sense.

Eating is something to appreciate with the five (or more) senses. In this extraordinary Japanese course dinner you will witness that, with full of sensations, inspirations, and findings.

 

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photos: Moritz Bernoully

 

DISHES:

WELCOME DISH / お通し

for the sensory sounds with the hearing sense muted / amplified

PLEASE WEAR THE EARPLUGS

  • rice crackers with aonori seaweeds 青海苔せんべい
  • fermented miso natto with cucumber (morokyu)　もろきゅう
  • fried noodles (age somen)　揚げそうめん
  • seaweed salad　わかめサラダ
  • fried buckwheat sticks (soba karinto) そばかりんとう
  • fresh soybeans (edamame) 枝豆
  • pickls (kojizuke, family recipe)　麹漬け（上田家秘伝）
  • mixed nuts　ミックスナッツ

APPETIZER / 前菜

taste & smell experiments 1. smell the MISO SOUP PERFUME with the paper (or spray it into your mouth if you like)

1. MISO SOUP PERFUME is distilled miso soup. It's transparet, but contains the flavours. See from time to time how the charactor of smell changes.

  • top note (green onion)
  • middle note (shitake / kombu)
  • last note (miso)

2. Taste the (real) miso soup.

MAIN DISH / 主菜

PLEASE WEAR THE BLINDFOLD

You will get exactly the same dish twice!

1st one:

  • blind folded
  • use your hands

2nd one:

  • take off the blindfold
  • use the chopsticks

DESSERT / デザート

surprising ice creams PLEASE WEAR THE BLINDFOLD AND EARPLUGS

SPECIAL DRINK

Green Tea for flavour pairing

Spray the orange juice perfume into your mouth, then taste the green tea. "Food combines well when they have major components in common" : the concept widely accepted in the molecular gastronomy scene (www.foodpairing.be)

 

 

INSPIRATION

This workshop is primarily inspired by the activities of artists-collective FoAM in Brussels. One of the inspiring events that Maja Kuzmanovic has developed at FoAM was Open Sauces (Nov. 2008). It was about the future of food in many different perspectives. The issues herein included were: molecular gastronomy, food pairing, eating and senses (where Maki Ueda has contributed), logistics and food problems, safety of foods, etc.

 

DEVELOPMENT

For the documentations, please visit the blog site Scent Laboratory [DINNER FOR MUTED SENSES]

 

CREDITS

 

concept & development : Maki Ueda

cooking : Noriko & Maki Ueda

service : Misae Endo & Maria, Tomoko Inamura

special thanks to : Camera Japan Festival

 

  1. LUNCH FOR THE MUTED SENSES
  2. OPEN SAUCES -TOKYO VERSION-
  3. OPEN SAUCES
  4. eau de parfum PERFECT JAPANESE WOMAN
  5. 7 SMELLS

Subcategories

SPACE INSTALLATIONS