by Michael Pattison

With open-ended generosity, Jade Wong’s How to Cook a Wasp observes and examines knowledge systems within a diasporic community. Specifically, the film focuses on Asian food workers in Seattle, Washington (Coast Salish land), and their cultural and practical approach to wasp consumption – which, as one anecdote in the film reveals, contrasts, often to comic ends, against corporate assumptions around wasps as pests. Situated within and drawing upon the artist’s relationships to elders at their mother’s restaurant (Wong’s practice more generally is informed by their family’s history in restaurant work), the film promotes everyday conversation as its chief virtue, a structuring principle through which its sense of warmth, collaboration and community can take hold.

In its opening moments, the film pairs imagery with sound in that dreamlike way analogue films often do. Captured on 16mm, hand processed in roasted oolong tea and Taiwanese rice wine, the blemish-heavy visuals fluctuate between the abstract and the intimate, with close-ups of flora and fauna seen as fleetingly as industrial kitchen spaces. The accompanying sound is a recording, or multiple recordings layered together, of a wasp (or wasps), whose buzzing is simultaneously relentless and agitated, drone-like but never resting. If the images are somewhat anonymous, or even ghostly, detached from any discernible perspective as they whizz through sites without any particular care for their content, the buzzing feels strangely familiar, its sheer presence and immediacy suggesting that it is the reason we are seeing what we are seeing: as if to imbue the film with a sense that it is personifying the eponymous insect’s point of view.

Wong’s hybrid documentary, though, is so much more than some POV experiment. One moment, it’s a compilation of found educational footage (mid-Atlantic narration, imagery of a wasp birthing itself from larva); the next, it’s a gentle observational work homing in on the careful, attentive and collaborative processes of wasp hunting and seaweed harvesting. Shifting almost constantly between these modes, the film accumulates a complex set of internal relationships: that between image and sound, as noted, but also between human and insect, corporate and collective politics, the centre and the periphery.

The film’s formal and thematic upturning of conventional hierarchies rests on its dynamic between everyday conversation, what might be understood as a kind of anecdotal mode of knowledge dissemination, and the assumed authority of the god-mode second-person address in the found footage documentary. While in the latter the wasp is looked at and metaphorically dissected so as to be understood, Wong’s own footage captures a conversation between two people that hints at something deeper and more ancestral than a mediated educational form – one that opportunistically sees the so-called problem of a workplace wasp infestation as a genuine source of sustenance.