Kimchi and Other Others

Abstract

In this paper, I use the food-based performances of contemporary Korean-American, Berlin-based artist Kate-Hers Rhee to examine the knottiness of immigration and identity politics in contemporary Berlin. Rhee’s works offer taste (and smell) as a means of engaging otherness, using Korean food as a site of social exchange. I focus on Rhee’s 2011 project, Dr. Rhee’s Kimtschi Shop, a performance installation masquerading as a pop-up store within a Berlin bar. Rhee’s choice of kimchi as both material object and metaphor for the apprehension (even disgust) many feel about a changing Europe is apt: kimchi is pungent, rich with chilis, garlic and ginger. As such, its pervasive smell can become shorthand for images of contagion and uncleanliness surrounding immigration, as Martin Manalansan notes from his fieldwork in Queens, New York. The 60 jars of homemade kimchi weren’t for sale: visitors to the “store” had to produce something of equal value to kimchi in order to barter. And what exactly is the value of kimchi? According to UNESCO, kimjang, the making of kimchi, is part of the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.” And so participants swapped homemade German rye bread, a copy of Wagner’s Parsifal, and blue jeans, filling out a lengthy, bureaucratic form detailing their own cultural heritage and defending the cultural status of their objects. This confusing, alienating, potentially humiliating experience of formal registration echoes the experiences of “foreigners” (Außländer, a word still in common use) living in Berlin. Indeed, some Germans balked at the given form, especially at describing their race and ethnicity. On a level, this is understandable: on German forms, there is no “race or ethnicity” box. To do away with categories of racial difference, in postwar ideology, was to do away with racism. Thus, Rhee’s anecdotes of lived racism and performances alike demonstrate the necessity of creating new language about race in Berlin. As David Theo Goldberg writes, “The European experience is a case study in the frustrations, delininations, and injustices of political racelessness” (2006, 335). Nowhere is this more visible than in Berlin. This paper, then, situates Rhee’s work bringing kimchi to Germans as using taste—the taste of kimchi—to intervene in political discussions about a postracial Berlin, as Germany stands at the brink of major demographic change.