Kollektiv Mai Ling

At a focal point of history, geography, gender and ethnicity, the performative project "Mai Ling kocht" (Mai Ling Cooks) is dedicated to the theme of Asian food culture on the move. In a six-part series of participatory happenings, there is a lot in the air while cooking together: the exchange of recipes and resistant stories, the deconstruction of stereotypes, racisms and sexisms as well as questions about migrant economies, culinary translations and hybridizations or the "Western" representations of Asian bodies. With its development of expanded artistic spaces of action around a socio-political blindspot with a high degree of topicality, "Mai Ling" convinced the jury. (Jury Statement)

With "Mai Ling", a female artist collective was founded in Vienna in 2019 that works on Asian art and culture with a focus on FLINT. The group programmatically gives a critical voice to the figure who, in Gerhard Polt's 1979 cabaret of the same name, had to endure a series of bitterly nasty exoticisms, stereotypes, and misogynistic assaults. How vacant such a voice against anti-Asian resentment is in the public sphere was recently illustrated by the force of racist attacks in connection with the Sars-CoV-2 virus