The Artwork
Five Flavors
2026
Participatory Performance
May 2026
Staged as a Chinese banquet, Five Flavors weaves oral histories from Asian American women workers with a performance lecture on the history of Chinese American food, immigration, sex, and labor. Each story is paired with a dish representing a flavor from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM): salty, sour, bitter, sweet, or pungent, which corresponds to an organ and emotion. As dishes circulate among participants, the lecture traces the connections between Panda Express, American colonialism, Julia Child, cultural appropriation, and Western feminism—while firmly situating itself in the contested and gentrifying site of Los Angeles Chinatown. The performance becomes a potluck of stories, representing Asian American womanhood through the metaphor of consumption and using food to heal fears, anxieties, anger, and resentments in Asian communities.
Born to immigrants from Kaiping, China, Lena Chen (b. 1987, San Francisco) was raised in the San Gabriel Valley, an ethnoburb of Los Angeles built on the unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva people. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, new media, and social practice. Her work has appeared at Transmediale, Anthology Film Archives, Carnegie Museum of Art, Sheffield DocFest, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and Färgfabriken, among other venues. Her practice explores race, gender, labor, and sexuality often through the lens of her own experience as a mother, former sex worker, and survivor of revenge porn.
Currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Performance Studies, Chen studies the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. She holds a MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA from Harvard University.