CinemAsia Amsterdam 2020 takes place this year from 4 to 8 March in Studio/K and Rialto. With various side programming and several delicious food, CinemAsia proudly presents:

The Asian Union x Comfort Ball

Comfort Ball will present a collective rice cake making session. After the Body Sessions workshop, we will gather around at a big rice cooker and share feelings, thoughts and experiences together. During the session, we will share our thoughts on how food making can be understood as togetherness, as kinship, as community and as sociopolitical action.

Comfort Ball is a gastronomy oriented art collective organised by visual artists and performers Bin Koh (KR) and Sumin Lee (KR). They distort and twist a traditional way of cooking with mainly Asian ingredients to formulate an alien scenery. This scenery speaks itself to show how they are displayed in Western society as an Asian woman, finding parallels between being low waged hospitality workers and Asian women in western society that are both fetishised and alienated at the same time. They address this observation and experience through cooking and stress the gazes of fetishisation and ignorance under the name of ‘exoticism’ within their body politics. Their act not only manifests Asian women but also the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled bodies. Comfort Ball has organised multiple events and performances at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Paradiso Amsterdam, NDSM nursery square, and Het Nieuwe Instituut.

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The Asian Union Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut was founded in 2018 by a group of students from both institutions located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Our motivation comes from “the urgency to take measures against the limitations coming from the misconceptions of Asian cultures in the Gerrit Rietveld Academie & Sandberg Instituut”. To take our first actions, we would like to introduce artists from a broader range of Asian cultures and backgrounds. This aim comes from a pure will to integrate artists of diversities and to broaden the repetitive names and works encountered in our institutions. Though a fragile step, it is our intention to acquaint each other of the boundless possibilities of these works without the imposed lense of cultural difference and exoticism.