Eating Under Watch: Shame, Desire, and the Production of Public Space

In her solo exhibition Cafeteria at RAINRAIN, Judy Chung does not treat the schools as a nostalgic backdrop; instead, she transforms it into an experimental site of “being watched.” The cafeteria here is both a concrete location and a high-density social apparatus: rules quickly emerge, identities are instantly marked, and judgments about what counts as “appropriate” or “embarrassing” circulate silently yet efficiently within the group. Chung compresses this environment into the pictorial field, allowing the body to become the most immediate site of conflict. Eating is no longer a routine activity but an exposure, a form of self-articulation carried out under the gaze of others.

 

In the exhibition’s central work, Symbiosis (Cafeteria), a student with three heads occupies a moment that is difficult to read as either eating or vomiting. Spaghetti erupts, tangles, and cuts across the space of the image, spreading like neural signals that have slipped out of control. Her body is stretched, duplicated, and misaligned, as if the image itself has malfunctioned and time has been slowed and torn apart. The surrounding figures remain uniformly detached, gazing or retreating, yet frozen in gestures that feel perpetually unfinished. Standing before the painting, the viewer cannot remain a simple observer; we become aware that we, too, are participating in this circulation of gazes. Shame here is not merely an internal emotion but a spatial structure, the product of bodies being shaped by the gaze within a public environment.

 

Through the lens of Erving Goffman’s analysis of everyday life as performance in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Chung’s scene depicts not simply a moment of loss of control but the instant when the “front stage” order begins to crack. The cafeteria, as a public space, normally demands that bodies maintain acceptable gestures and rhythms. Yet when eating and vomiting become indistinguishable and movement loses its graceful boundaries, the performer has no time to retreat to the “backstage” to repair the self-image. Instead, one must hastily maintain composure under collective scrutiny. The visual “glitch” that runs through the painting thus becomes the visible trace of a temporarily malfunctioning performance mechanism. As we gaze upon the multi-headed protagonist, we unconsciously adjust our own positions, realizing that we too inhabit a kind of “front stage.” The tension of the exhibition emerges precisely from this structure of implicated viewing: we are both spectators and potential performers.

 

Spaghetti, as a recurring motif throughout the exhibition, carries this tension. It is both satisfying and embarrassing; both an ordinary daily lunch and an object loaded with social insinuation. Food here becomes a social signifier, boundaries between what is “cool” and “uncool” are quietly established through taste and choice. Rather than explicitly critiquing institutional structures, Chung repeatedly mobilizes this soft, slippery, difficult-to-control material to make viewers physically sense a state of in-betweenness. Attraction and repulsion coexist within the same frame, while meaning refuses to stabilize.