Activating the City: Urban Gastronomy concentrates on life, art and community rediscovered through the gastronomy that keeps the city vibrant. Gastronomy doesn’t simply remain in searching for star-rated restaurants or consuming sensory experience of new taste, but it is inclusive of the entire actions of exchange in producing ingredients, from planting and growing seed, buying and selling food around the market, and exchanging conversations. Such activities invest vitality to the ‘city’, lead us to look back into our lives, and create new community culture.

 Avant-garde artists and designers who sought to reconcile art and life, not only paid attention to creating art, but our lives and the fundamental necessities in life. The faith that art could restore individual lives while creating a new community is deeply rooted in the basis of our lives, which are food, clothing and shelter and as architecture and design are the critical means to actualize this, people began to dream of a utopian community, a city that anyone could lead pleasant and healthy life.    

 Recently, artists, designers and architects who imagine new life and community are having renewed thoughts in approaching the ‘issue of making a living’ or the ‘act of eating’, located at the base of our lives. They rather imagined design methodology as the device to form relationships among people in consideration of how we shall live, than producing new object or work. Within this process, gastronomy combined with social movement in an interesting way, thus operating as the element of practice in seeking healthy lives.

 This exhibition presents the ideas and activities of various subject, which recognizes food culture as creative and productive movements based on the three keywords, Food x Urban Mobility, Food x Community, and Food x Sharing Culture upon the ‘stage of city’.

 This exhibition intends to approach taste, experienced through food not as means to satisfy sense, but as social mediator connecting individual and individual, and individual and community and it would provide opportunity to encounter the yet undiscovered sense of beauty within the city, recognizing the renewed city that we live in.