Wei Weng

Latent in Eat A Chili is the feeling of being caught between cultures and an awareness of how one’s memory, hazing over time, sharpens with certain stimulants.

-Brooklyn Rail

Through closely studying the characters’ shared frustration and quest for passion, we are drawn to reflect on our own easy acceptances of a nihilistic, predetermined, and mechanical lifestyle. In this light, eating chilis becomes a fitting and necessary antidote.

-Asia Art Pacific Magazine

About Eat A Chili: A Visual Essay

In this hybrid fiction, the human consumption of chili pepper has surged beyond the culinary indulgence of spice. Beginning with an explosion of pepper grenades hijacking a bakery, Eat A Chili interweaves a disparate cast of thrill seekers, veering between language and image to reveal a cross-border feast blending the uncanny and emotional synesthesia of the everyday. The result is a science fiction ode to the pleasurable burns kindled by the spiciest of all.

Eat A Chili is the debut publication by visual artist Wei Weng, borne from a disturbingly spicy meal in her adopted home of Copenhagen. Synesthetically struck by the fiery onslaught of spice with a wicked vision, Weng began to sprinkle visual fragments from her photo archive with a blend of short stories, much like the multi-sensory layers of heat emanating and reverberating from human taste receptors.

Within this re-staging a series of surreal encounters, Weng worked in close collaboration with photographer Jan Rosseel to sift through a decade of her photographic work, tracing the experience of metaphorical and physical burn through time and place. Eat A Chili is a bilingual publication that can be read in two languages and in two directions. The result can therefore be read visually and textually both from left to right, but also right to left, challenging the usual linearity of the western cultural imagination.

With a compilation of images from China, Myanmar, Thailand, Australia, the United States, and Denmark, Eat A Chili feast upon the ways in which image-making crosses culture and constructs meaning. The book’s intertwined narrative is reflective of Weng’s personal roots shaped by migration. Through a science fictional lens, the artist pay tribute to the wonders of capsaicin—a hardly ascetic meditation upon the uncanny and emotional synesthesia of the everyday.

關於 《吃辣椒》：視覺散文集

在這本虛構的散文集裡，未來的人類嗜辣的手法之放縱，使得辣椒不只是添加在美食里的調味料。書的一開始，小說便進入到一個被辣椒手榴彈劫持的麵包坊，之後陸續登場的人物也是個個尋求刺激。《吃辣椒》把人物的故事切換在語言和圖像之間，營造一場跨越邊界的視覺狂歡的同時，也串起一幕幕怪異和日常情緒的通感畫面。

《吃辣椒》是視覺藝術家翁唯的第一本出版物。本書的靈感源於作者在哥本哈根的家中一次膳食的辛辣體驗。作者被辣得束手無策，瞬間的通感彌生出一個邪惡的想法：把一組視覺碎片散播到相對情緒化的短篇故事中，讓灼熱感在不同層次之間得以回放，就像當一層熱油蔓延在人類的味覺神經受體之上。

為了演繹這一幕幕超現實的邂逅，翁唯與攝影師Jan Rosseel達成合作共識，倆人在作者過去十年的攝影作品裡面，精挑細選出不同的時間與地點，朝隱喻和身體的方向追尋灼痛感的蹤跡。這次合作呈現的《吃辣椒》是一本雙語出版物， 讀者可以通過兩種語言和兩個方向來閱讀。《吃辣椒》在視覺和文字上既提供了雙向思考，讓讀者可以從左到右、或從右到左閱讀，又同時挑戰了西方文化想像的線性思維。

《吃辣椒》匯聚了作者在中國、緬甸、泰國、澳大利亞、美國、丹麥拍攝的影像，本書嘗試了多層含義的影像製作，不僅跨越文化界線，也探索意義建構上的多樣性。書中採用了交纏的敘述方式，映照了作者本人受遷移影響而塑造的獨特個人根基。在書中，被歌頌的辣椒素凝聚了科幻的神奇色彩—也不乏作者透過日常的修行，收集那些生活裡的怪異和情緒化的通感碎片。