©Sidian Liu; Bridget C’s Kitchen (self-portrait), 2022

Today we are wrapping up looking at the work of artists who I met at the 2024 Society for Photographic Education conference. This year, the conference will take place March 6th-8th in Reno, NV, and I look forward to attending and participating in the different events. More details on the 2025 SPE conference may be found here. Now, we have The Conch Girl Project by Sidian Liu.

Sidian Liu 刘思典 (b.1997, Foshan, China) is an artist, translator, and yarner living in Brooklyn, New York. She often creates collaborative projects with her nearby community and spaces to explore the ways we interact with and experience one another as a society, as well as to create a sanctuary for self in unfamiliar spaces. She pulls from Chinese traditions, oral narratives, and personal stories to provide context to many of her projects, creating a bridge between her experiences in both Chinese and American societies. Sidian works in photography, performance, and installation to depict these visions of emotional solidarity and safe spaces amidst an unpredictable world. Much like a cat shedding hair to people it likes, Liu uses traces to facilitate intimacy from a distance while respecting personal boundaries.

Sidian Liu received her BA in English at Shanghai International Studies University in 2019, and her MFA in Photography at Parsons, The New School in 2023. She is the recipient of 2024 Denis Roussel Fellowship (the Center of Fine Art Photography, CO, US, 2023), the Snider Prize (MoCP, US, 2023), and was recognized in the Top 10 of 9th Annual Photography Rankings in China (Photography Museum of Lishui, China, 2022).

Follow Sidian on Instagram: @ccinstar

©Sidian Liu; Street Publication of The Conch Girl at Flower’s Kitchen, 2023

The Conch Girl Project

The Conch Girl Project is a photo-based, socially engaged project that utilizes cooking to co-nurture the mutual care for strangers started by Sidian Liu in New York City in 2022. In a time of globalization, migration, and crisis, this project seeks to create experiential chances for healing kinship and emotional solidarity within a densely populated metropolis.

Sidian migrated to New York City in 2021 from the opposite side of the globe. Dealing with her sense of displacement, she has been asking strangers to let her use their kitchen in solitude. In return, she cooks them a meal. She asks for the least amount of face-to-face contact: she would arrive, cook, take photos, clean up, and leave. After the visit, the resulting photos are sent to the kitchen owners, who are invited to make responses. These correspondences, along with the photos, will later be printed large and wheat-pasted on the green construction boards on the New York City streets, a public-facing, liminal space. The street publication is both a presentation and an open call that invites future collaboration.

The least-amount-of-in-person-contact rule orchestrated in the project resonates with the various barriers that a newcomer faces when they migrate, and provides a spatial distance that enables emotional solidarity between strangers. A respectful boundary is consequently formed, brewing a sense of intimacy similar to Bauman’s love for neighbors: loving oneself in others and respecting each others’ uniqueness.

Through wheat-pasting the kitchen photos on the New York City’s construction board, The Conch Girl Project also connects with the practice of Public Art. In sharing the private domestic space in the public, and presenting the correspondence between the kitchen owner and the kitchen borrower, the street publications function as activism posters that ask people to stop, take a look, and rethink the relationships between fellow strangers, neighbors, and one another whom we rely on. Beginning with the desire to quench the thirst of an individual’s survival and desire for familial care, The Conch Girl Project developed into a humble gesture of “care-ful society,” a feminist notion inspired by non-patriarchal social structures and often cited in iLiana Fokianaki’s writings.

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project at ZY&WX’s Kitchen (self-portrait), 2022

Daniel George: In your statement, you describe how this work began with your feelings of displacement after having moved to New York City from across the world. Tell us more about how The Conch Girl Project began, and how it has developed over time.

Sidian Liu: I moved to New York for school in 2021 and had my first Western Christmas. I was pretty alone when all my friends went home, so I went on the streets and took a lot of photos of strangers’ windows. The heavily Christmasly-decorated windows emitted halos of coziness and the warmth of other people’s home, and I knew I wanted to have them. This eventually evolved into a video installation called Stealing Light, where I interacted with the images of others’ windows with the help of video art. But it was within this process that I started to wonder––what if I really go into strangers’ kitchens? What can I do to make them open their doors to me, and what can I do to make myself feel at home once I enter? That’s how I conceive The Conch Girl Project. Cooking is closely linked with the feeling of being-at-home for me. Cooking for myself and others grants me agency–it makes me feel that I am able to take care of myself, and have a sense of control in my own life, and able to care for others. It has been my dream to have a kitchen that I enjoy using, as I grew up drifting from one dormitory to another, and then one temporary abode to another. So I naturally thought of occupying strangers’ kitchens, where I can enact my agency to feel-at-home but also cook a meal for them in return.

After two tests at my classmates’ apartments, I put out an online open call at The Listing Project, Cragslist, and social media. Strangers signed up and I reached out to schedule a time with them, and the project officially kicked off. After around 5 visits, I started to think about the appropriate presentation for the images and texts I produced. Since this project is for strangers and neighbors, it would only make sense to publish them on the streets––then the presentation can also function as a continuous open call. I first tried printing them into letter-size flyers. Then I realized that there are so many details in each image I took in these kitchens that I think they deserve to be seen huge. That’s how I started to print each image as big as I can, and wheat-paste on the street construction boards. I call it street publishing. They usually last about 7–10 days before they get destroyed or paste over, which I think speaks suitably to the transient nature in how we encounter one another in a city like New York.

©Sidian Liu; Street Publication of The Conch Girl at ZY&WX’s Kitchen, 2023

DG: You write that your work “seeks to create experiential chances for healing kinship and emotional solidarity.” In what ways do you feel you are accomplishing this—through your performance and photographs?

SL: The intimacy within this project is facilitated through traces. Photographs and texts are tools to document them.

My request of the least amount of face-to-face contact creates a distance that resonates with various barriers that a newcomer faces when they try to fit in after migrating to a new place. It also points to the contemporary reality of bonding in a metropolis: relationships require time, yet you have little history here, and everything around you is rapidly shifting. By enacting this separation, the social hardship from settling and adapting is acknowledged by both sides. It is thus a vitally respectful boundary, with which the intimacy is enabled to be constructed.

Because I ask for the least amount of face-to-face contact, I am usually left alone in strangers’ kitchens, where the traces of their physical truth and reality prevails. I get to know them through what objects they possess, how they arrange their domestic environment, and how they interpret and react to my request. And then when I leave, they inhale the odors I leave behind, and taste the food I make. I see this as an act of mutual care––they are granting my wish, letting me in and allowing me to temporarily occupy their space the way I ask for, while I perform a direct act of care. The success of this exchange requires but also ensures both sides of the existence of trust and kindness from strangers.

Then when the kitchen chapter is published on the streets, they become traces of what happened and what could happen for future collaborators to catch on. They present a possibility that this form of care exists among fellow strangers, who in fact are all neighbors.

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project at Jac K’s Kitchen (self-portrait), 2023

DG: I’m really intrigued by the collaborative aspect of this project. You utilize others’ kitchens, mail them photos to which they are asked to respond, and paste those images on the streets seeking new collaborations. This sort of inclusivity seems to be a trend within most of your work. What motivates you to involve others so actively in your creative practice? What do you feel others can offer?

SL: We are all we have sometimes, well, maybe all the time. If you depend on many people you actually become more independent.

I tried to live as independent of my parents as I could from a young age so that I could decide how I live, starting from small aspects. In middle school I stopped asking my folks for new clothes because my mom usually hated the fashion I chose for myself and would only buy me things she liked instead. So for winters, I would borrow a jacket from my roommate for a week, and then a sweater from another friend, etc. In a way I have lived in a “patchwork” lifestyle for a long time. So when I started to make art I realized that I can’t live or create without the help from others. By others I mean the general public, anyone you might meet on the streets.

We are living in an uncertain time, and sometimes you might find yourself with no stable sources of support, but you can still feel loved in a “crowdfunding” way. The scraps and pieces you gather from a large crowd can work wonders, as long as you keep an open-mind to perceive the kindness you can get, and be grateful––be mindful of what you can do for them, too. Others will be trustworthy if you are trustful, and vice versa.

©Sidian Liu; Street Publication of The Conch Girl at Annie’s Kitchen, 2023

DG: As I read the story of the Conch Girl, I was fascinated by the ways in which you incorporated various details into your project—like avoiding face-to-face contact as an homage to the secretive nature of the girl cleaning and cooking for the fisherman. As you have continued to work on this series, what new insights have you gained regarding the ways you are “informed and influenced by this tradition?”

SL: The separation choreographed in this project is not a homage to the folktale but my intuitive choice when I seek kitchens to borrow and feel at-home in. It was when I tried to name this project that I realized the similarity it has with this folktale. Though the story sounds misogynistic as it was written hundreds of years ago, I couldn’t think of another title more affecting. But folktales are constantly being collectively rewritten by folks when they retell the story, so I thought why can’t I write and pass down my version of it?

In Recipe for Xiangting, I meditated a lot on my upbringing, as the food I cooked for Xiangting hit very close to home. On the first day of my middle school summer vacation, I woke up and was automatically granted the responsibility of chores for my family, from getting groceries, doing laundry, to cooking dinner. My parents left me some cash and a note explaining what to do, and they were already at work. And that became my every summer: sometimes I was hanging out with friends and then I would need to go home early because I needed to start cooking. I didn’t cook with love, just out of necessity––or else I would also be hungry. I do wonder sometimes, if I would have different summers were I a boy. Would I still be trained, so righteously, into performing care labor.

When I make The Conch Girl Project, however, I am in a different context––I am a newcomer in a place I have no previous history. Cooking thus expands my connection, takes me to new places, opens new doors, and forms new connections. I am utilizing what I am good at to react to my reality, and to create community for myself.

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project at Xiangting’s Kitchen (self-portrait), 2022

DG: Last year, I was able to pick up a copy of The Conch Girl Project, Issue One zine that you produced. I enjoyed your use of newsprint. In a way, it felt like a collectible version of your public wheat paste displays. A sort of material equivalent. Do you have plans to produce future volumes? Anything you’d like to share about the publication or the future of the project?

SL: “Collectible version of your public wheat-paste displays”––I like how you describe it! I chose newsprint and the format of a newspaper because it is simultaneously heavy and light. One may treasure it and frame it and the other may discard it. It speaks a lot to our encounters with strangers.

And yes I do plan on making new issues. In September 2024, with the generous support from the Denis Roussel Fellowship, organized by the Center for Fine Art Photography, I was fortunate enough to conduct The Conch Girl Project in Fort Collins, Colorado for a week. The recipes for these 6 kitchens are now published on the project’s website, and currently I am working on a zine for the Fort Collins edition. I do not feel appropriate to wheat-paste the Fort Collins edition on New York streets, so I am thinking of alternative formats for the Fort Collins zine as well.

The Conch Girl Project will remain one of my long term projects, so I do hope for more opportunities to travel with it.

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project at Xiangting’s Kitchen (her slippers), 2022

©Sidian Liu; Street Publication of The Conch Girl at Fanxy’s Kitchen, 2023

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project at Fumi’s Kitchen (pink sauce), 2022

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project at Jac K’s Kitchen (party pills), 2023

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project at Meijia’s Kitchen (dish detergent), 2022

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project in Fort Collins, at Celia T’s Kitchen (self-portrait), 2024

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project in Fort Collins, at Stacy A’s Kitchen (gift from Stacy), 2024

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl Project in Fort Collins, at Davina L’s Kitchen (baked cheesy rice), 2024

©Sidian Liu; The Conch Girl’s Cookbook Issue One, 2023