Food and spices become her art

WHEN a chef visits a spice market, he gets ideas about what he'd like to cook. When Korean artist Haegue Yang visited Little India for the first time and saw the rich variety of ingredients, she decided to turn them into art.

Ganthoda powder, dry mango powder, da huang powder and even Nigella powder - no relation to Nigella Lawson - were among the unusual looking and sounding spices that provided Yang with the starting point for her artist residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI).

The STPI exhibition features frames of "spice moons" - circles of spices whose rough textures and earthy hues evoke your sense of sight, smell, taste and touch, even though the circles are encased in their glass frames.