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During the residency, Hao Pei continued his long-term project inquiry on rice seed sovereignty. Looking past the troubled history, he began to examine Singapore’s relationship with rice beyond the consumption level and our perception of rice seed sovereignty in a non-agrarian society.
In a 2-day workshop, in collaboration with David Chen from The Little Rice Company, as part of Farm Day Out at Sprout Hub, he decided to experiment with the speculative disappearing recipe of rice water as a starting point to probe into the issue of rice seed sovereignty. The diminishing use of rice water for infants is often attributed by the shift in lifestyle practices in current times such as the switch to the more convenient rice cooker and baby formula powder. But I would like to suggest a different theory - could the disappearing recipe be caused by the introduction of genetically modified/hybrid seeds since the sixties? Through the sharing of his research, seeded prompts and visual cues like the collected rice seeds and rice packages, he hoped to shed light on the disappearing native rice seeds in the region and the ongoing global movement of seed sovereignty, only to encounter fragmented conversations among the participants.
