Ever wanted to take an orange very seriously? During this quiet ritual, and perhaps the least existentially confusing thing you’ll do on a Friday, participants are invited to slow down and perform a full body dissection of an unsuspecting citrus.
Each orange will be gently taken apart into its elemental structures:
The brave peel
The mysterious central core
The clingy pith
The elusive segment membranes
The juicy pulp which I can barely see without glasses
This is not a snack. It's something to do when you’ve grown aware of the disappearance of contemplative temporality in a hyper accelerated age, where duration has been lost and time reduced to isolated units of productivity (deadlines and the things we do to convince the algorithm we matter) and stimulation (reels & news feeds or whatever people are watching while waiting for red lights). We’ll undo that~ with an orange.
We’ll contemplate time and the fleeting nature of fruity existence. This workshop invites you to slow down, sniff an orange, and look beautiful while doing it.
*We’ll be listening to an audiobook of Finnegans Wake during the workshop.
Come for the fruit. Stay for the profound boredom.
This is a hands-on workshop with Qianqian Liu, the artist of How to Cook a Loved One, at Hopkins Hall Gallery. This free event is capped at 20 attendees, so an RSVP is required.
This event has reached capacity! Please check uas.osu.edu/events for future workshops and events.
How to Cook a Loved One transforms memory into matter, turning grief into something that can be held, smelled, and even imagined as tasted. The work asks what happens when mourning is not only emotional but physical—when loss is folded into the textures and rituals of daily life. Objects in the installation hover between the familiar and the unsettling. A “body,” made from a family recipe of dried beef soup, blurs nourishment with preservation, evoking the warmth of home while carrying the weight of mortality. The work invites viewers to sit with the contradictions of grief: comfort and decay, tenderness and finality. Rather than offering mourning as something fixed or ceremonial, the work treats it as an evolving ritual—one that can be absurd, tender, and strangely beautiful. It creates a space where memory is stirred, consumed, and released—where absence is transformed into presence through the language of objects.
This is a solo exhibition by Qianqian Liu.
Reception: Friday, October 24, 4–5:30 PM, Hopkins Hall Gallery