Wok the Dog began in the summer of 1997 in a market few blocks from my mom’s house in Taipei. I returned to the same market, year after year, every time I was home for a visit. The project started as a confrontation of fears and grew into a larger dialogue about the cost of living, the disassociation of perception and more.
There is a part to this story that I don’t usually tell.
In early 2004, I was looking through my archives as I was in the midst of submitting for a grant, and I needed 20 consistent images from the same series. As I dug through the archives, I realized I had 7 years of work on the same topic. At the same time, I was thinking about the ban the Bush Administration had imposed on press coverage of the bodies of US troops being send home from Iraq, in an effort to spin the nightmare in Iraq as “good news.”
Our perception of reality is influenced by what we see, what we don’t see, the presentation of what we see. Life is cheapened, death eased because there are no visuals attached or the images are sterilized. I stared at the giant stack of proof sheets of markets in Taipei and realized everything was connected. I could use the vernacular of food, markets and animals and talk about a larger issue.
Wok the Dog IS about the COST OF LIVING.
The series has its own inherent set of controversies built in, both from the title and the subject matter. I didn’t want to disclose this portion of the story of the impetus for the series, nor my internal dialogue back then, because I didn’t want to get into an argument. I stuck with confrontation of childhood fears and directed the conversation towards food, sustainability, etc.
Lately I’ve found myself telling people with ease the whole story of how the project started. So maybe it is finally time to tell the whole story.
You can read more about Wok the Dog here and see images from the ongoing series here (20 countries / 74 cities down – another 20 to go).
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