Food writer, cook, and domestic goddess Nigella Lawson argues passionately for the decoupling of guilt from pleasure. For her, there are no ‘guilty pleasures’ in eating. Hunger is a sensation of want and eating satiates a longing for a lost feeling or faraway memory she describes as a ‘rhapsodic paradise’ that strikes deeper than mere necessity. This poetic understanding of eating comes from a specific bourgeois fantasy – for many, it is simply a matter of survival. Yet to borrow from Nigella, it could also embody the hope for – or the memory of – a different, more materially abundant life.
Nigella can only speak through the prism of her own class (which she recognizes). But let us sit with her idea a while longer. We could take from it that we should indulge whatever hedonism we so desire. But what are the ethics of Epicureanism? In Jonny Negron’s painting Mukbang (2021), a woman in an emerald-colored top is seated against a sky-blue backdrop, hazy clouds floating behind her. She is before a table with a mound of bright red crawfish flecked with corn the color of faded gold – a Louisiana dish presented as a still life. She raises a hand to the corner of her mouth, pinky erect, with nails lacquered a reddish-brown like that of liver. A single shellfish is passing through her claret lips. On the right side of the composition rests half a lemon and a soda cup. Her manner is blasé. She engages us with a gaze so bored and quotidian it reminds me of Manet’s bartender in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).
The title of the work suggests that Negron imagines us watching her eat. Mukbang – a portmanteau of the Korean words for ‘eating’ and ‘broadcast’ – is the phenomenon of watching people consume (oftentimes) excessively large meals as a kind of durational performance. There is always a video feed, sometimes live, sometimes not, sometimes with talking, slurping, chewing, huffing, sniffling, choking, moaning. Diegetic sounds are an essential part of the performance.
Mukbang satisfies a market for abject pleasure, and like any kind of pleasure the market is inexhaustible. There’s an element of pornography, too: a performer satisfies their audience through their own simulation of self-pleasure. Unsurprisingly then, the most successful genre of mukbang is that of petite young women eating quantities large enough for small armies (videos of the YouTuber ‘tzuyang’ eating 112 plates of sushi, 5.5 kilograms of noodle soup, or 8 kilograms of crab, have each clocked over 10 million views). In these videos, food becomes no more than a thing to be conquered. Because a mukbang fails if the meal is not finished, the horizon of failure looms before the first bite. It is a conditional kind of pleasure we are bearing witness to – a clean plate becomes akin to an orgasm.
Negron’s painting evokes a different set of relations between his subject and her viewer than those within the conventional theater of mukbang. Her portion of crawfish is abundant though not excessive. Upright and dignified, her body language suggests she values eating as a methodical, almost religious practice. She is pleasuring herself not with the view of achieving gratification for us, the unseen viewer. If we attempt to subject her to a pornographic reading, her gaze tells us that she will be spiteful, that she will refuse. She seems to assert that gluttony is not corruption but a crest of honor – guilt is not a constituent part of her language for pleasure.
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung is a writer, critic, and founding editor of Decolonial Hacker. In 2021, he won the International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC).
Jonny Negron's work will be on view in the Art Basel Discoveries sector. He is represented by Château Shatto, Los Angeles.