Tender Dinner

Tender Dinner is an interactive video installation that recreates an East Asian family dinner table to explore intergenerational connections among women through intimate storytelling, visuals, and sound. Blending feminine aesthetics with emotionally charged narratives, the work invites viewers into a shared space of memory, tenderness, and resilience.

Project Video

Abstract

*Tender Dinner* is an interactive video installation that explores the emotional and intergenerational connections among women in contemporary East Asia. Centered around the symbolic space of a family dinner table, the work recreates this familiar domestic ritual in a darkened, intimate environment, using interactive video projections and voiceovers to evoke shared and imagined memories across generations. The installation invites audiences into a tender and reflective space where storytelling becomes a form of emotional inheritance.

Rooted in East Asian familial culture, where the dinner table often functions as a key site of daily gathering, hierarchy, and communication, *Tender Dinner* transforms this site into one of quiet resistance, mutual care, and solidarity. Three fictionalized characters—a Grandmother, a Mother, and a Daughter—narrate their inner thoughts and generational experiences. Each story is activated by the audience picking up a pair of chopsticks placed on the table, symbolizing both the triggering of memory and the intimate gesture of sharing a meal.

The introductory video, voiced by the Daughter, sets the emotional tone: a reflection on hierarchy, longing for understanding, and the quiet burdens carried in familial roles. Viewers then choose among the three narratives, each unfolding through visual collages of historical photographs, botanical imagery, and hand-rendered watercolor textures. The Grandmother’s narrative, inspired by Korean feminist artist Yun Suknam, reflects on her journey from housewife to artist, honoring her own mother and the history of women before her. The Mother’s story, informed by the aesthetics of flowers and the writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, addresses the imbalance of gender roles in marriage and the quiet strength of maternal love. The Daughter’s voice, drawn from the artist’s personal memories, reflects on inherited identity through the metaphor of hair and the unspoken weight of legacy.

Visually, the project challenges conventional notions of femininity through a deliberate juxtaposition of delicate imagery—flowers, watercolor, domestic symbols—with introspective, often heavy audio narratives. This contrast reveals the emotional complexity of women’s roles under patriarchal structures, transforming softness into strength. By creating a looped interaction structure that resists linear storytelling, the project mirrors the layered and recursive nature of intergenerational memory and emotional transmission.

By inviting viewers to listen in the narratives, *Tender Dinner* is not just a representation of women’s stories, but a call to collective remembrance and imagination. It asks audiences to reflect on how tenderness, often dismissed as passive, can instead be a powerful force—binding generations, challenging silence, and building quiet solidarities across time and space.

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