Soups as Fluid Archive Cantonese Herbal Soup Making Workshops

Starting in the summer of 2025, I began hosting soup-making workshops in multiple locations, from Macau and Hong Kong to the Netherlands and Belgium, across the places where I grew up, live and work, collaborating and experimenting with soup-making methods at the butterroom, 1983, Constant organisation, and De Voorkamer, (re)excising the living technology that carries kinship, memory, metabolic and cultural knowledge. We engaged in a practice that resists extractive logics of efficiency, tracing memories of domestic and newly sensed experiences as rich intersectional sites of knowledge-making.

I have been focused on investigating movement and living relationships as the starting point of my work. Due to my geography and proximity to family and friends, I became increasingly interested in exploring kinship as a form of care that extends beyond blood relations to encompass chosen, circumstantial, and interdependent connections. 

From sensory memory to cultural knowledge and bodily nourishment, I want to know: how might we rethink kinship not only through ancestry or genetics but also through the act of eating? The connection between cooking for self and for others?  What kinds of relationships become possible through shared metabolic entanglements, gendered labour, and the quiet wisdom of culinary care?

In an effort to understand this concept, I’m exploring the rich tradition of Cantonese herbal soups and their unique ingredients as a methodological entry point, examining how they relate to my family upbringing and the roots of my understanding of care and co-existence.

In this workshop, I start sharing the soup that my aunts, grandmother, and mother will make, using ingredients sourced from the local Chinese shop, and sharing stories and knowledge about food as medicine and self-medicated practices under the guidance of Traditional Chinese Medicine principles. Participants will share their memories of soup, friends, family, ingredients, tools and more. Along with the memorable food they bring to the workshop, I guide each group in making their own version of seasonal herbal soup.