Customs Declaration

Pineapple, ginger, persimmons, peaches, long bitter melon, short bitter melon, papaya and jackfruit: Cathy Lu has gilded and strung together over 1900 pieces of slip cast ceramic fruit into an elaborate and elevated net. Her labor and material imbue each fruit and vegetable with equal value, rejecting categorizations of separate or distinct, other or exotic.

Cathy Lu comes from a Taiwanese immigrant family; comes from Miami, from within a city-wide community of Cuban exiles; comes from a place of prefaces of ‘where I come from’ and stories of ‘back home’. From this place of neither here nor there, Lu sources an understanding of produce and food as a way in which culture, community, and belonging are expressed. Her work references the experience of craving the taste of foods from distant homelands, the logistical bureaucratic challenges of accessing and recreating these familiar flavors, and the way certain produce and dishes become assimilated—or not— to other cultures.

It is unclear what exactly the ceramic produce net at A-B Projects might be used for—whether it captures and ensnares or binds and protects; whether it holds emptiness or is itself full.