The Outsider Banquet is a research project that interrogates the intersections of migration, death, and culinary practices. It focuses on “outsider” plants: those growing on the edges, often ignored or dismissed. These are plants that weren’t originally from here. They weren’t cultivated, but arrived—sometimes by accident, sometimes carried. while the invisible border of scents effectively engages with our imagination of the Others.

I'm interested in the awkward, uneven relationships we form with landscapes when we arrive somewhere new, or when we’re forced to move. And, Food as a trace of movement.

There's also the question of knowledge. Much of what we know about edible plants came from watching animals. Birds are picking berries. Pigs rooting for truffles. Trial, error, observation. It wasn’t about symbolism—it was survival. I’m interested in this kind of learning: slow, indirect, embodied. The kind that doesn’t always get recorded, but sticks anyway.

Part of this work also circles back to my father’s story. He escaped from Shi Tung to Hong Kong during a period of famine and violence. He didn’t talk much about the journey, but I remember that our home became a kind of in-between place—other people who had also crossed came to stay. They weren’t family, but they were treated as such.

One story he did tell: someone gave him food and water during his escape. A stranger. He never knew their name. Never found them again. But he remembered.

What I understand now is that these networks of food, shelter, and small help were how people made it through. Migration is never solitary, but full of entanglements with other beings, ecologies, and ways of knowing.