Chōri (조리)
Chōri Collective was originally founded as an artist platform facilitating collaboration among Asian artists, to examine complex colonial histories and question binary structures through culinary metaphor. It has evolved into a dynamic space where artists, performers, and non-human agents encounter each other, mixing, contaminating, and fermenting through experimental and transdisciplinary practices.
“Chōri” (조리/料理) in Hanja means "cooking," emphasizing the process, unlike "Yōri" (요리/料理), which highlights the polished final dish. We employ the metaphor of bodies as food and views the power structures inscribed upon them as recipes, seeking to decompose and and further understand them as ferments. The kitchen disrupts traditional hierarchies of senses and binaries, fostering collaborative gestures and performative happenings. Between white-cube and black-box, Chōri Collective seeks to contaminate, knead, break, decompose, and ferment colonial structures.
Chōri Dance : 4-Course-Meal
~ 삼첩 반상一汁三菜 ~
ON DISPLAY project Lake Studio,
23 mins 18 sec, Performance Score Video
Part 1. 반찬 Ban Chan
Part 2. 小鉢 Kobachi
Part 3. Side Dish
Part 4. Hot Pot
This is a performance record/score of Chōri Dance, which raise the question of how to document a performance. Different from Western 4 course meals that are served sequentially, East Asian cuisine creates a space based on the table. The three small dishes, written in Korean, Japanese, and English, is harmonized with the hot pot and dream of a change.
Chōri Dance Asian Wellness
Live Works Summit Festival, 50 mins,
Performance on the Stage
How can Asian bodies imagine new rhythms beyond the flattened notion of “Asianess” in Europe? Through video, sound, and performance, artists* from different Asian countries use the metaphor of cooking—each embodying a selected ingredient—to trace individual and collective stories across national, bodily, and cultural histories. Set within an immersive Asian Wellness Centre, the performance blends critical play and care, navigating themes of migration, memory, and healing. Using the language of New Age wellness, 3 Asian artists interrogate how self-care intersects with colonial legacies, labor, and displacement. Our practice draws from diverse sources—Korean National Gymnastics, spice and pain, politics of rice, Sufi rituals, and family lore—merging them into a dynamic, simmering pot of shared yet distinct rhythms.
Get to Know Us
Chōri Picnic ~ Summer Roll~
Tanz im August Festival, 13 mins,
Performance in the Park
This performance draws on the metaphor of the summer roll, a familiar dish in Berlin’s Asian restaurants, reimagining the body as an ingredient and the stage as rice paper. Referencing gymnastics practices rooted in World War II and East Asian colonial histories, the piece repeats and records these disciplined movements on stage as a way of collectively confronting their legacy.
Layer by layer, the performance accumulates textures through multilingual translation, choreographic research with nonhuman elements, and documentary techniques drawn from Butoh. Through these gestures, the standardized movements of gymnastics gradually dissolve into a shared rhythm that emerges between bodies, languages, and temporalities.
The premiere took place as a 15-minute outdoor performance in a Berlin park during the summer. Performed on a large white canvas, the audience was invited to sit, stomp, crumple, and write freely on the surface. This canvas could be interpreted as a kitchen table, a white plate, or a picnic mat—an open, unstable stage where performance, inscription, and participation overlap. The audience was asked to leave traces during the piece, and, at the end, the canvas was rolled up like rice paper. This act marked the completion of a collective summer roll, a performative recipe for the end of the season.
Chōri Picnic ~ Summer Roll~
We May Be Separated Like Islands But, 45 mins,
Performance at Daegu Art Factory
The same score was later reinterpreted in winter, this time within the rigid architecture of a white cube. Performed by three Korean dancers, the work examined how discipline, as inscribed in the body through National Gymnastics, could be deconstructed, reassembled, and returned to its point of origin. The movements were continuously played on the gallery wall, creating a live loop of repetition and reflection. In contrast to the ephemeral, porous event of summer, this winter version sharpened the viewer’s awareness of spatial containment, institutional time, and the power relations embedded in bodily choreographies.
Mapping Chōri ~ Swimming Pickles~
Ongoing Workshop-Research series
“We focus on Chōri senses such as smell-touch-taste, using the metaphor of Ocean-a process of osmosis to navigate ourselves from one small cave to salty water to perform? dance? sweat? be soaked? with other species.”
The Participants could experience different traditional fermentation food, which includes Nuka (an ingredient in Japanese fermentation) and Korean pickles, to connect with senses and non-human relations, by imagining pickles as ocean and tracing the border between fixed territories through history and culture.
At the end we invite people to draw a collective map with our memories of food together to think about how to imagine the space beyond the binaries of human/non-human, native/foreigner, Korea/Japan(colonized/colonizer). This is the map of the ocean which is not a concrete territory but a wavering space where we sweat, swim, submerge, and uprise together.
Four-Course Meal ~ Hot Pot~
The 10th Expo Festival, English Theater Berlin,
45 mins, Performance on Stage
Three performers bring forth three choreographic ingredients, each placed within the stage-bowl. National Gymanastics intertwined with East Asian colonial history, a waltz with wine trees from France, and trees nurtured by light. These ingredients simmer within the stage-hot pot, lit up by the audience, as they illuminate them. This serves as a recipe for the long winter, inviting our diverse bodies to fermentate the colonial structure.
Chōri Beat
Ongoing Workshop-Research series,
Nagelstudio, Berlin
