Didier Lerebours

White Zinfandel. The name might bring back memories of playing, “slap the bag” with Franzia boxed wine in your college days. But for Jiminie Ha, adjunct professor at RISD, curator, and creative director at W/--- Projects, the name has a different meaning. The white wine has become the perfect ingredient for her magazine, White Zinfandel which launched in 2011. Through her design studio, W/--- Projects (which works with clients like Capricious Gallery, NARS, and Maison Martin Margiela), comes the biannual food and culture print run. But don’t expect to see food on the covers. Although Jiminie Ha’s Instagram bio says she’s no K-POP star, her life seems just as colorful. Her days are a mix of Devin Troy Strother neon art at Untitled Art Fair with a fleet of dinner parties with the kind of precious food, more meant for photographing than eating. The first issue of White Zinfandel gets at Jiminie’s appreciation for art and food from the get-go. Dedicated to Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1970s New York’s restaurant FOOD, a meeting spot for artists, the magazine is highly conceptual in its relationship to what we eat. Each issue is going to get more abstract, and with past covers featuring scratch ‘n sniff integration, we’re looking forward to seeing its evolution.

Photo Credit: Alex Lee

What do you see as the relationship between curating for W/---Project Space and curating the magazine?

(The space does not exist anymore, I had to give up the space in 2012 when I was living in Rome for about year doing my residency at the American Academy in Rome.) Curating, editing and design all connect to one another conceptually as we are reframing content, selecting and creating new meanings out of various pairings, combinations and relationships. Publishing an art book after running a space for four years made sense to me in my mind in that way. To me, both the printed matter and gallery site still live as empty sites regardless of their platform, and offer opportunities to work within their parameters.

Photo Credit: Alex Lee

Have you always been interested in the relationship between food and art?

Food is our common denominator, and both food and art, to me feel like necessities. It’s what one requires to sustain oneself, but at the other side of the spectrum, it instills passion, obsession, and inspiration. You see throughout art history how eating itself is coveted—from traditional still life, to surrealists like Dalí creating a cookbook inspired by his favorite restaurants and chefs, or conceptual artists such as Gordon Matta Clark opening up an entire restaurant dedicated to experimental menus. Combining these two arenas wasn’t necessarily done to emulate what’s been established in the food/art world, but to explore how food itself could expand into a larger thematic territory that addresses topics on an even more abstract level.

Obviously the magazine has always been rooted in physical spaces, with W/---Project Space. But how did you come up with the ideas for a dinner party to celebrate each launch issue?

The dinner party launch becomes an extension of the art book, and in itself becomes a performance piece to celebrate the launch of new edition in real time, rather in a static form We want the chefs that we work with to understand that spirit, and also create oeuvres themselves through their menus that all should connect back to the theme. Everything is considered right down to the location, plating and decoration. Every element that is integrated into that celebratory meal are all individually considered from concept to execution, and all contribute to the overall experience and theme.

Photo Credit: Alex Lee

What made you want to launch the magazine with the story of Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD? I wish I could’ve been around to see it the first time around, particularly reading your first issue. What was it about that restaurant/ artists’ space in particular that felt like the grounds for a new magazine?

The spirit is the same. It was a way of introducing a new way of thinking about food, and for White Zinfandel, it was also a new entry point into the dialog about food topics without being so obvious. Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant celebrated the experimental and I really felt like the first issue had to reflect that spirit through his menu. And if you look at the rest of the issues, they’ve become even weirder, more abstract than the first two issues, which I think has really matured the series as a whole.

First Published on New Distribution House