Background: When an Everyday Ingredient Meets Contemporary Art
 

Garlic — pungent when raw, irresistible when cooked, and an indispensable staple of the kitchen — became the subject of an unconventional artistic experiment at OōEli, Hangzhou, in the spring of 2022.
 

Driven by the playful idea that ‘the most ordinary can become the most fashionable’, initiator Sangyu Chen launched an open and pop-up-style participatory art project centred around one of the most familiar ingredients in everyday life.

Using an extremely accessible and commonplace material, the project sought to return the authority to create, interpret, price and circulate art to the public.
 

The Rules: A Deliberately ‘Serious’ Ritual
 

To give this spontaneous community project a sense of ceremony, the initiator devised a formal Garlic Project Adoption Agreement, framing the entire process of collaborative creation and commercial exchange.
 

1. Adoption and creative freedom:

Participants selected a bulb of garlic they felt drawn to from a plastic bag provided by the initiator and signed the adoption agreement. They were free to transform the garlic in any way they wished — by dismantling or decorating it, extracting its smell or flavour, developing visual motifs from it, or even creating an intangible or physical work based solely on the concept of garlic.
 

2. Complete autonomy:

The participant, defined in the agreement as Party B, held full authority over the resulting work. There were no restrictions on creative methods. Participants were also free to determine the selling price of their work and retained 100% of any sales income.
 

3. Responsibilities of Party A:

Party A, Sangyu Chen, acted as curator and was responsible for displaying the works, promoting them on site, handling sales and payments, and transparently publishing information about subsequent transactions.

Exhibition, Sale and Circulation: From a Vintage Market to Barter
 

Recruitment began on 14 April 2022. Over the following two weeks, members of the OōEli community took part in a process of creative experimentation — moving through what the project jokingly described as stages of ‘germination, explosion, difficult birth and collapse’.
 

The process eventually resulted in more than sixteen garlic-based artworks in a wide range of forms.
 

During the exhibition and sales phase, the works entered public space through a deliberately informal yet highly tactile display strategy.
 

 • Vintage Furniture Display

The project was presented at a second-hand furniture market organised by Tsutaya Books at OōEli. Pieces of vintage furniture, each carrying visible traces of use and time, became temporary exhibition structures for the garlic artworks.

The raw materiality of the garlic created an unexpected visual dialogue with the aged surfaces and nostalgic atmosphere of the furniture.
 

 • Barter: Finding the Right Person

Several works remained unsold after the market. Rather than treating this as an endpoint, the initiator brought the remaining garlic works to a subsequent barter event.

Through exchanges based on objects, personal affinity or mutual interest, each work eventually found a new collector.

 • Secondary Circulation and Tracking

Collectors who purchased or exchanged the artworks were encouraged to continue reselling, auctioning or exchanging them. With the collectors’ permission, the initiator continued to trace the movement of individual garlic works through different social networks, exploring the real-life circulation and agency of art objects within an open market.