Chinakohl
Drawing diary / 14-second AI-assisted video, 2026
Chinakohl is a drawing diary developed in response to the research note Chinese-looking faces abroad. Having lived in Berlin from 2020 to 2024, I recognised many of the small and ambiguous encounters described in the interview: moments when a face seems to be read before a person has had the chance to speak. The interviewee recalls strangers greeting her with “你好” or “Konnichiwa” based on appearance alone, even when their intention may simply have been friendly.
The German word Chinakohl literally combines China and Kohl—“China cabbage.” The vegetable originated in China, yet today it is also cultivated locally in Germany. A cabbage grown in German soil can therefore carry a label reading “Ursprung: Deutschland”—“origin: Germany”—while still being called Chinakohl. Duden I became interested in this small linguistic contradiction: a name can continue to point elsewhere even when the thing itself has taken root here.
The cabbage became a metaphor for the ways identities are named, read and classified from the outside. Rather than illustrating the interview directly, I follow one ordinary object through naming, categorisation, peeling, weighing and different culinary contexts. This approach is partly inspired by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: attending closely to an ordinary organism can open onto larger questions of migration, place, value and relation.
The work finally returns to one quiet sentence from the interview: “I just want to quietly buy my vegetables.” For me, it shifts the work away from the question of “where someone really belongs” toward something more ordinary: the wish to move through everyday life without always being
asked to explain where one comes from.
References
Duden. “Chinakohl” and “Kohl.” Duden Online. Chinakohl is written as the compound Chinakohl, while Kohl denotes cabbage.
Bundeszentrum für Ernährung (BZfE). “Zeit für heimischen Chinakohl.” 29 May 2024. The article notes that Chinakohl originated in China and is also produced domestically in Germany.
https://www.bzfe.de/presse/pressemeldungen-archiv/zeit-fuer-heimischenchinakohl
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
