We can smell the scent of a steaming pot of jasmine rice with its very distinct combination of water and the perfume of jasmine. It’s enough to make one curious with hunger, and as we make our way through the space we come to the room at the end of the hallway, well lit, with windows at the corner of the building. Sunlight pours in from an October afternoon, and already we feel the compression of the gallery lifted from our shoulders. There are people sitting around round tables and on stools; they are talking, reading the guide for galleries, weighing their next move. The 303 Gallery is at the corner of Spring and Greene street in Soho, New York, formerly the main art district of the city.

There is a mess of stacked doors leaning against the walls in this room; doors presumably of the gallery. They are unhinged and stacked. To the right as we enter is a makeshift table made from sawhorses and yet another door from the space. A couple of people seem to be busying themselves with the preparation of some vegetables–chopping and cutting, opening gallon cans of bamboo shoots. In the middle of the room there are two pots cooking on camping rings. One seems to have been prepared already, the other is on its way. People are helping themselves to the rice from a cooker large enough to feed the whole Island of Manhattan. Right next to the low gas cookers is an old used refrigerator, white with hints of it age around the edges. As one sits down for the bowl of food (made of white enamel with blue rims), one begins to realize that this is a distinctively different experience from others we have had in an art gallery or with art. There are also many milky white cylindrical buckets, which seem to be sloshing with waste food, all that is left over. In the refrigerator there are Thai long beans, Thai roundish green eggplants as well as the mini pea eggplants, looking rather green with a strong bitterness to its taste. Bitter and stronger. And some packets of green curry.

— Rirkrit Tiravanija, A RETROSPECTIVE (TOMORROW IS ANOTHER FINE DAY)