IMOGEN KWOK

At a party for Italian loungewear brand Comme Si, chef, food stylist and artist Imogen Kwok debuted a new work called An Egg But Not An Egg. Guests were invited to pick up a hot, pale-blue egg and crack it open, revealing a steaming and glistening mound of white rice inside. Onlookers giggled with joy as the illusion was revealed, reveling in the playful inversion of sensory expectations.

It’s one of many works where Kwok uses food as a medium, elevating the act of eating to an artistic experience. At Paris Fashion Week in 2023, for example, Kwok showed a piece at an event for fashion brand Matteau that presented food as interactive minimalist sculptures: a large dish of glossy, marble-sized melon balls next to overlapping wafer-thin layers of transparent radish and salmon rilette. In another work, for auction house Sotheby’s, dark chocolate–dipped grapes, glacé fruits, rose-flavored Turkish delight and silver Jordan almonds spilled out of stylized 17th-century tableware and on to a white sheet—a playful reference to the opulent abundance of Dutch Golden Age still-life paintings. 

Like those still lifes, Kwok’s work is luxurious and indulgent—part of her appeal for brands like Loewe, Hermès and Ruinart. But it is also often modern, minimal and—in many cases—curiously inorganic, an aesthetic sensibility that draws attention to the act of eating. By deconstructing and decontextualizing food, Kwok encourages those who engage with her work to challenge their preconceptions around eating, inviting them to question how something should look or taste, as well as where and what we eat.

“I approach food as more of a medium to communicate,” she explains on a call from her studio in London. “It’s conceptually driven, as opposed to eating to fulfill you in a physical sense.” It is also accessible. Typically, the rules of engagement for art are Don’t get too close, don’t touch and definitely don’t taste. Kwok implores the viewer to do the opposite: “I don’t want people to be intimidated by the work—I want people to eat this thing I’ve made!” 

“I don’t want people to be intimidated—I want people to eat this thing I’ve made!”

Kwok has accomplished a lot for someone only in her early 30s. After growing up in Australia and New York with a Chinese father and a South Korean mother, she studied art history at St. Andrews in Scotland before moving back to New York to work in contemporary art galleries Lehmann Maupin and David Zwirner. Then, in 2015, she decided to attend the French Culinary Institute in New York and worked as a chef at Michelin-starred restaurants in the city. It had a formative effect on her work.

Kwok gives the example of a butternut squash dish that she would make at celebrated restaurant Eleven Madison Park. After being sliced on a meat slicer, the squash was cut into crescents, cooked and assembled on the plate in a perfect circle. This manipulation (Kwok doesn’t like to call it a process, as that implies something “unnatural, like processed foods”) results in the diner being confronted with a food that is at once familiar and unusual, almost uncanny. “It’s a visceral practice, adding depth and layers to things in front of you,” she says.

It’s an approach that can be seen in the “peanut pearls” Kwok created for a tasting menu at Rosewood London, for example—yogurt-covered raisins finished with edible silver paint and placed in empty peanut shells. “I wanted it to be a trick of the eye with whimsy, an interactive play on something being hidden in something else,” she says. For the launch of a new Loewe fragrance, she took this idea even further, creating trompe l’oeil pears out of white chocolate and confectioners’ sugar that contain at their center—in a playful confusion of artifice and reality—actual pear. 

For Kwok, this emphasis on presentation extends beyond the plate. The way guests interact with the work is central to the experience, with each part of the installation carefully choreographed. She will often insist on visiting the space in advance and the presentation—as well as the recipe—is an integral part of the process when she’s conceptualizing a work at her studio. “It’s about the environment, the lighting; that becomes part of the work too,” she says. “I have to walk through the installation, step-by-step, to feel the experience.” 

Kwok’s ability to switch freely between being a chef, artist, curator, stylist and set designer is at the heart of her interactive installations. “It’s very unique,” she says when asked how she sees her practice. “I feel like it’s partially my training and my background, but also [an expression of] my point of view, my own perspective.” 

It also doesn’t limit her to working only with food. Kwok is now thinking about how to grow creatively, or “push the practice along” as she puts it, by expanding into different mediums. “It’s an exciting time right now to assess all the projects that I’ve done over the past couple of years and learn how to take it to the next level,” she says. “At the moment I’m trying to experiment with larger installations that are not edible, taking everything that we understand about creating art with food and applying that to [permanent] works.” 

Food will always have a deep significance for her, however. At the studio, she tends to eat what’s comforting and familiar—rice and noodle dishes that remind her of her parents. Along with an egg, she may add water spinach or other greens, or a scoop of silken tofu or sesame oil from the Asian market that’s near her studio—if she remembers. “I’m usually too busy to eat,” Kwok laughs.

Kwok wears a dress by CHRISTOPHER ESBER and a necklace by RAGBAG.