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How we cook the rules?

Zuping
English
2025-2026

Zine, Poster
148.5*105mm, 297*420mm
Riso print

After graduating, I began living in rented accommodation. The kitchen, compact, enclosed, and without an open flame, quickly became a site where I experienced the constraints of a designed and predetermined mode of use. Such constraints are not architectural accidents but manifestations of an imposed logic that shapes behaviour. Many young adults navigate similar transitional habitats, entering rented spaces and adapting themselves to unfamiliar social orders. In this project, the kitchen becomes a conceptual device: an artificial structure laden with prescribed functions whose embedded rules are often overlooked and uncritically absorbed.

To investigate this, I invited five friends, each living with a different rented kitchen typology, to cook a single dish. I mapped how spatial layouts condition objects and actions across three dimensions: structure, artefacts, and embodied practice. Each friend demonstrated a distinct mode of adaptation, which I articulated as five behavioural attitudes: Indifference, Compromise, Coping, Conformity, and Alteration. These attitudes echo traditional Chinese cooking methods—velveting, blanching, battering, steaming, and cutting—and together form a visual system, realised through a booklet and a series of foldable zine posters.

Though rooted in personal domestic spaces, the resulting visualisations articulate broader strategies of coexistence, offering a microcosmic view of how individuals negotiate structural constraints in contemporary urban life.

Special Thanks to
Huang Yudan, Zhang Xianrui, Huang Xutian, QQ, Lu Hongjin

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