ENCOUNTERING ECHOES: ECHOING ENCOUNTER

Following Rolf Hughes’ notion of exposition (2015) as the act of creating a field of encounter, this inaugural issue reframes exposition as a space of echoing—a resonance between the seen and unseen, the said and unsaid. To encounter is to come up against what resists assimilation—an idea, a material, a history, a theory, or another being. To echo is to let that encounter reverberate and transform. Between encountering and echoing lies an ethics of care, speculation, and reciprocity—a willingness to stay with what is incomplete, uncertain, or even misread.

In line with the Arts of the contact zone (Pratt 1991), encounters are never neutral; they unfold in zones of tension, translation, and transformation. Similarly, Studio Note treats encounter and echo as creative and critical forces that shape our practices, pedagogies, and therefore our identities.

We invite contributions that explore encountering and echoing as speculative and performative acts of research.

Studio Note Journal Nº 1

Editors-in-Chief | Alphabetic Order:

Niloofar Amini
Gareth Jones
Jorge Valdovinos
Laura Yuile

Associate Editors | Alphabetic Order:

Eman AlHabashneh
Francesca Brunetti
Ruehl Muller
Mohammed Ali Sharieff
Raynal Somiah
Yvan Tina
Zihong Yue

Typeset in:
Editorial Team

Copy Editing:
Editorial Team

Proof Reading:
Editorial Team

Design:
Editorial Team

Published by:
University for the Creative Arts | ICI

Publication location:
Farnham, Surrey, UK
Xiamen, Fujian Province, China

Online publication date:
Summer 2026

ISSN: 2978-8080 (Print)
E-ISSN: 2978-8099 (Online)

studionote@uca.ac.uk
www.studionotejournal.org

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Marinated Portal Coast — A South China Sea Recipe
Gabriel Gee - ggee@fus.edu

In the summer of 2025, I visited the Kinmen islands and the city of Xiamen, exploring their rich maritime heritage, as well as farming and culinary traditions as visible in both countryside, coastal interfaces, and urbanised shores. I looked at and bought a couple of cookbooks along the way, which I have long been interested in as repositories of intangible heritage, documenting traditions in communities, histories of passages between places and times, as well as the creative practice of the culinary arts. In a cookbook, recipes are signifying units through which the body of the book is articulated. I find that recipes are also poetic iterations, in both form — the steps in the cooking as versification — and content — the world conveyed and transformed (Fig.1).
As such, they are able to condense the physical experiences of the senses that culinary practice entails, and the ideas that accompany creative acts (Panofsky, 1924). In their capacity to present and arrange, in a range of combinations, the sensory and imaginary realms, recipes lend themselves judiciously to the exposition of artistic research (Schwab, 2019). They can operate as portals, through which to reach the multifaceted textures and temporalities of the world. I brought back several recipes from my stay in Kinmen and Xiamen, including the following, which is made with ‘disciplinary cannibalism’ (Dufrêne and Taylor, 2010), using a bit of geography, history, anthropology, and culinary arts, taking advantage of coastal inclinations towards developing contact zones (Pratt, 1991), at the intersection of land and sea, maritime circulations, and inhabitations (Fig.2).

Xiamen and Kinmen Islands, China.

I
Get a good piece of coast from your geographer.

For best results, your coast shouldn’t be too long or too short — too long and it might decompose into an undecipherable ragoût; too short and it may well prove too thin a taste. The older it is, the better.
For this recipe, we are using the South China Sea coast of the portal breed,¹ some southern Fujian coast, and, if you can get it, some much-prized golden island coast (Fig.3).²

Figure 1. Gee, G. (2025). [Untitled].

II
Let your coasts marinate at room temperature, a matter of weeks; a couple of months is even better.

In the meantime, get a deck chair to face the sea, pour yourself a drink of your choice, and enjoy the view (Fig.4).

Figure 2. Gee, G. (2025). [Untitled].

III
Once the coasts are tender, place them on the kitchen table under an exposing light.

Note — The coast should be slightly moist, with pearls of marine salt dripping on the edge; if you find it to be dry, you have most likely overslept in the lounging chair! A dry coast means you have either leapt back into prehistoric time or fast-forwarded to the future where everything is eaten as dry as a winter leaf. The best option at this point is to go back to your geographer — unless you are intent on conveying precisely an arid form of time travelling — and repeat the marinating process, making sure you don’t overdo those ‘dark mules’!³

Figure 3. Gee, G. (2025). [Untitled].

IV
The light will reveal the portal coasts’ inner flavours: oyster, beef, and pineapple, together with ample provision of salt (Jinmen, 2003).⁴

Oysters hark back to the hunter-gatherers (Gillis, 2012). Beef is a bit more of a muddled affair, its consumption on these coastal shores being interwoven with more recent global circulations and fashion (Goossaert, 2005) (Fig.5). Pineapple evokes sunny afternoons and business opportunities from overseas (Ahpia Lim, n.d.).

Figure 4. Gee, G. (2025). [Untitled].

V
Each of the three coastal flavours can be prepared raw or cooked (Lévi-Strauss, 1964),⁵ depending on your preferred sensibility and the impression you want to convey to your guests.

A raw menu and dishes will bring a sense of primeval times, when early human communities roamed coastlines, picking and eating fresh shellfish on the spot (Gillis, 2012), when fire was still to enhance the consumption of the hunted bag, when fruits were sucked right from the trees, in an altogether refreshing ambiance of longue durée (Braudel, 1949).⁶
A cooked meal, on the other hand, is likely to convey a sense of sophistication, a general feeling of civilised appreciation, in which the ingredients are ingested already transformed from a state of nature, brought from naked insouciance to an enlightened self-awareness, placing the emphasis on the present, considering the rocks on which the oysters have been carefully encouraged to multiply, the farmers who imported cattle on lands that had hitherto never seen ruminants graze their fields (Goossaert, 2005), and the containers enabling the preservation of exotic sweetness across distant seas.

RAW PORTAL COAST MENU

Oysters & Lemon
Kaoliang Steak Tartare
or
Charcoal Grilled Beef - rare
Sunny Pineapple Salad with Kaoliang Liqueur

COOKED PORTAL COAST MENU

Oyster Omelette
Beef Stew
or
Steak and Kidney Noodles
Gulangyu Pineapple Bank Cake

The Raw menu is best appreciated with hands only, although you might provide a large knife for your guests should you present the rare grilled beef as one large joint rather than pre-cut, which makes for a stronger impression. The Cooked menu is intended to be appreciated with chopsticks (Sabban, 2024). Alternatively, you can explore a dry menu:

DRY MENU

Oyster Powder Soup
Beef Jerky
Candied Pineapple

Portal coasts convey portal insights into time and space, borders of memory (Boyle and Irvings, 2023), laced with ambitions and suspicions, memories and expectations, traces and lives of varied entities. Enjoy with a glass of Kinmen Kaoliang spirit!

Figure 5. Gee, G. (2025). [Untitled].

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As a clue and opening, we are using the Chinese term ‘men’, meaning ‘door’, present in both the names Xiamen and Kinmen, i.e. Jinmen.
The reference to gold comes from Jinmen, i.e. ‘jin’.
A Dark Mule is a cocktail popular by the seaside.
Salt production in Kinmen dates back to the 1400s and 1500s.
In reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s seminal study on the raw and the cooked; for a discussion of cooked versus raw in Chinese culinary traditions, see the work of Françoise Sabban (Sabban, 2024).
In reference to Fernand Braudel’s influential study on the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world, first published in 1949; for an alternative conception of the formation of the économie-monde, see Francis Gipouloux’s volume on the Asian Mediterranean (Gipouloux, 2024).

- A Journey of Ahpia Lim: Tracing Back the Cake-Craftsmanship in Southern Fujian (n.d.) Gulangyu.

- Boyle, E. and Irvings, S. (2023) Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Pacific. Leiden: Brill.

- Braudel, F. (1949) La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Paris: Armand Colin.

- Dufrêne, T. and Taylor, A.-M. (2010) Cannibalismes disciplinaires: quand l’histoire de l’art et l’anthropologie se rencontrent. Paris: INHA.

- Gillis, J. (2012) The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

- Gipouloux, F. (2024) La Méditerranée asiatique: villes portuaires et réseaux marchands en Chine, au Japon et en Asie du Sud-Est, XVIe–XXIe siècles. Paris: CNRS.

- Goossaert, V. (2005) L’interdit du boeuf en Chine: agriculture, éthique et sacrifice. Paris: Collège de France – Institut des hautes études chinoises.

- Panofsky, E. (1968) Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. New York: Harper & Row. (Originally published in German in 1924.)
- Pratt, M.L. (1991) ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, pp. 33–40.
- Sabban, F. (2024) La Chine par le menu: Cuisine, culture culinaire et traditions alimentaires chinoises. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
- Schwab, M. (2019) ‘Expositionality’, in de Assis, P. and D’Errico, L. (eds.) Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion. London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 27–45.
- Wuzhou yan chang qibai nian (2003). Jinmen.

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