初次看到>艺术家雷鹭的作品是受到策展人张小芮邀请在2025首届未来艺术节：遥感未来起居展览上看到的
First saw the works of artist Lei Lu’s at the Future Art Festival 2025: Remote Sensing Future Living Exhibition, invited by curator Ree
雷鹭的 “菜单” 系列作品，是一场对日常饮食的温柔解构 —— 当肉骨茶的汤色漫过餐盘边缘，当海南鸡饭的油光映出社会规训的影子，那些标注着 “Singlish”“Safe space” 的 “食材栏”，与散落着身份叩问、权力反思的 “做法栏”，共同构成了一张张未完成的对话切片。
Dining as a Prism of Dialogue: Cultural Fluidity and Cognitive Rifts in Lei Lu’s performance series
Lei Lu’s This is Illegal in Singapore Recipe Relics (Diam Leh) (2023 - ) series is a tender deconstruction of everyday cuisine—where the broth of bak kut teh spills beyond the plate’s edge, where the sheen of Hainanese chicken rice mirrors the shadows of social conditioning. The "Ingredients" column, labeled with terms like “Singlish”and “Safe Space”, and the "Method" section, scattered with reflections on identity and power, together form a collection of unfinished conversational fragments.
这些 “菜单” 里，“食材” 不再是葱姜蒜椒，而是参与者的文化基因：“Singlish” 暗涌着新加坡多元文化的混血特质，“No onions”（海南鸡饭栏）藏着个体饮食偏好，更折射出文化禁忌的隐线。而 “做法” 栏里的碎语 ，如 “社工人为何成了规训的符号？”“控制欲与焦虑如何在暴力中滋生？”，则将饭桌上的即兴思辨，凝固成社会结构的解剖图。雷鹭以食物为诱饵，钓出了人们潜藏的身份困惑、家庭创伤与权力叩问 —— 肉骨茶注释里 “福建草本汤” 与 “胡椒猪骨汤” 的认知错位，戳破了文化根源的暧昧假面；糯米鸡 “自学烹饪” 的叙述，暗涌着家庭情感真空的涟漪；咖喱鸡对脱口秀边界的探问，让餐盘边缘生长出语言权力的荆棘。
In these "recipes", the ingredients are no longer just scallions, ginger, garlic, or peppers but fragments of cultural DNA: Singlish hints at Singapore’s hybrid multiculturalism, while No onions (under Hainanese chicken rice) conceals personal dietary quirks and, more subtly, the invisible threads of cultural taboos. Meanwhile, the fragmented musings in the "method" section — questions like why have social workers become symbols of conformity or how does control and anxiety breed violence — freeze dinner-table debates into dissections of social structures. Lu uses food as bait to lure out latent identity crises, familial wounds, and power dynamics. The cognitive dissonance between bak kut teh’s “Hokkien herbal soup" and "peppery pork bone broth" punctures the illusion of cultural origins; the narrative of self-taught cooking in glutinous rice chicken ripples with the void of familial warmth; and curry chicken’s probing of stand-up comedy’s boundaries sprouts thorns of linguistic power along the plate’s rim.
生于中国、辗转新加坡与欧洲的成长轨迹，赋予雷鹭天然的 “流动观察者” 视角。她既是饭桌上的参与者（与陌生人共饮一碗肉骨茶汤），又是局外的记录者（将对话蒸馏成艺术符号）。这种双重身份，让她捕捉到对话中最微妙的裂隙：印尼移民后代说 “从未觉得漂泊” 时，文化归属的悖论已悄然浮现；食客念叨 “食堂鸡饭再也吃不出旧味” 时，记忆与现实的龃龉已凝成叹息。这些裂隙里，藏着全球化时代最普遍的生存困境 ——我们以食物锚定身份，却发现 “家乡味” 早已被生活篡改；我们试图用饮食连接他人，却在对话中撞见社会规训的阴影。
Born in China and raised in Singapore and now based in Europe, Lu embodies the perspective of a fluid observer—both a participant at the table (sharing bak kut teh broth with strangers) and an outsider archiving dialogues (distilling conversations into artistic symbols). This duality allows her to capture the subtlest fissures: when a descendant of Indonesian immigrants says I’ve never felt adrift, the paradox of cultural belonging surfaces; when a diner murmurs the canteen’s chicken rice doesn’t taste the same, the friction between memory and reality crystallizes into a sigh. Within these rifts lie the universal dilemmas of globalization—we anchor our identities in food, only to find "homely flavors" altered by life; we seek connection through dining, yet collide with the specters of social conditioning.
更动人的是，这些 “菜单” 从未闭合：当观众凝视肉骨茶的汤色，有人看见文化根源的挣扎，有人想起外婆的草药汤，有人追问 “何为家乡”。雷鹭将对话的开放性交给观众，使每一道菜都成为 未完成的思想剧场—— 食材栏的身份标签是剧本伏笔，做法栏的思辨碎片是台词草稿，而观众的人生体验，才是最终的演译者。
What’s most striking is that these "recipes" remain perpetually open. As viewers gaze into bak kut teh’s broth, some see struggles of cultural roots, others recall grandmother’s herbal soups, and still others ask, “What defines home?”Lu entrusts the audience with the openness of dialogue, turning each dish into an unfinished theater of thought—the identity markers in the ingredients column are plot hints, the reflective fragments in the method section are draft scripts, and the viewers’ lived experiences become the ultimate interpreters.
最终，雷鹭的 “菜单” 是一场关于 “人如何栖居于文化与社会” 的默剧。餐盘里的食物不再只是果腹之物，而是盛满了身份的流体、记忆的褶皱与权力的回声。当汤匙与碗沿相击，那些藏在 “肉骨茶是胡椒味还是草药味” 里的困惑，那些隐于 “食堂鸡饭消失” 中的遗憾，都化作了全球化时代里，每个人都逃不开的生存叩问 ——我们以食物为镜，照见的不仅是味蕾的记忆，更是自身与世界的复杂纠缠。
Ultimately, Lei Lu’s This is Illegal in Singapore (Diam Leh) Relics is a silent play about how we inhabit culture and society. The food on the plate is no longer mere sustenance but a vessel brimming with fluid identities, the creases of memory, and echoes of power. When the spoon clinks against the bowl, the doubts buried in whether bak kut teh should be peppery or herbal and the regrets hidden in “[t]he canteen’s chicken rice is gone” transform into existential questions no one in this globalized era can escape. We hold up food as a mirror—reflecting not just the memories of our palates, but the intricate tangle of ourselves and the world.
——人民美术网 艺术总监
中国通俗文艺研究会理事
李家夫（冰承）
2025年6月10日北京
—By Li Jiafu (Bing Cheng)
Art Director, PeopleArt
06/10/2025
雷鹭（生于1999年）是一位居住在伦的新加坡艺术家。她于2023年毕业于皇家艺术学院当代艺术实践硕士学位，并于 2022年在英围金史密斯大学获得一等（荣誉）美术学位。她最近的作品展览包括在伦敦菲茨罗维亚画廊举办的个展【非慰籍美食】（2024年）、以及在杭州 Imaginary 乙举办的“室外积雪如山”展览（2023年）。她还为伦敦大学东方与非洲研究学院（SOAS）的 Movement Beyond Limit（s） 等研究课题小组讨论做出了贡献.并且她的作品与展出在《Fad 杂志》和《MilkTeeth》等平台上被发表过专题报道。
Lu (b.1999) is a London based Singaporean artist. She graduated MA Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art in 2023, and with a First Class (Hons) Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in 2022, United Kingdom. Recent exhibitions of her work include solo exhibition Discomfort
Food （2024）at Fitzrovla Gallery, London, and 尽管室外积雪如山（2023）at Imaginary Z, Hangzhou, China. She had also been invited to and contributed to panel discussions, such as Movement Beyond Limit(s) at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and have been featured in platforms including the FadMagazine and MilkTeeth.
