A Multi-Sensory Design of Perceiving Artworks Through the Sense of Taste | Mingyan Wei
Welcome
Welcome to the exhibit of my major research project. My topic focuses on the multi-sensory design of using the sense of taste to interpret the traditional Chinese ink paintings. And I would like to name the exhibit “A Bite of Museum” to make it exhibit “palatable” and offer a different perceptual method for museumgoers to understand and access Chinese art and culture.
About me
Mingyan Wei | Media professional
Mingyan.wei@student.ocadu.ca
Toronto, Ontario
Mingyan graduated from the University of Sydney with a major in Media Practice and has ten years of working experience in the media field based in Beijing, China. Through
out her career, she has been learning to look at things from different perspectives. And now, she is interested in observing things around her through the lens of inclusive thinking.
Mingyan’s passion for art and design brought her to this program. She is currently working on a multi-sensory design project of interpreting artworks with the sense of taste to increase the equitable access of museums as well as bridge the cultural barriers.
Research Background
As one of the five human senses, gustation’s ability to perform a pedagogical role to inspire critical thinking has prompted curators to introduce food to museums and explore multi-sensory approaches for quite a long time. And there have been some valuable attempts and successful practices of incorporating food as a perceptual way to enrich the experience of museums around the world. The following five areas summarize some current practices of taste and food in some museums.
While plenty of encouraging progress has been made to the practice of multi-sensory transformation approaches based on food and the sense of taste, due to the numerous art forms and cultural diversity, the great potential of gustation in the realm of cognition still remains to be tapped.
This research will work on figuring out the answer to the question ” How can gustation enhance the understanding and perception of traditional Chinese ink paintings through multi-sensory design?” specifically, the sub-questions are:
- How can gustatory experiences enhance audience interpretations of certain artworks and bridge cultural barriers?
- How can integrating food into exhibition design enhance interactions between audiences and artworks?
- To what extent can affordances of visual perception be translated into gustatory perception?
- How can research findings be translated so that stakeholders (museums, art galleries) can develop feasible audience interactions with artworks enhanced by gustatory experiences?
