Upcoming Tacoma performance turns dumpling-making into a sensory experience
Cooking is one of humanity’s most ancient communal events. For centuries, we have gathered around fire pits and kitchens to catch up with friends and family while conducting the laborious task of preparing a meal.
But in today’s society that increasingly relies on outsourced food, the dedication and community that goes into cooking your favorite dishes can go unrecognized.
University of Washington Tacoma art professor Yixuan Pan is looking to change that through an unconventional and empathetic sensory experience.
Tacoma Arts Live is hosting Pan’s ASMR Dumpling-Making performance art piece on Nov. 20 as part of her multi-component project, “From Scratch: Tasting the Tenderness in Food Production”.
Pan, who describes herself as an “anti-disciplinary artist”, first imagined the performance years ago as a class project. Inspired by her Chinese heritage and memories in the kitchen, she first wanted to create sheet music for cooking.
“I think the sound of cooking can be really rhythmic, and there’s poetry in that,” Pan said. “So I want to make people read the scores almost like musicians read sheet music to create music. Instead of playing violin, you’re playing carrots.”
That idea blossomed into a multipart art piece that kicks off with Thursday’s event at The Tacoma Armory.
Performers on stage will spend an hour rhythmically slicing, kneading and folding ingredients to make dumplings. Specialized microphones will amplify the sounds for the audience, creating a stylized ASMR soundscape absent of talking and other distractions.
ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, and refers to the relaxing sensation some people get from hearing specific sounds or seeing certain movements. Videos attempting to invoke this response in viewers have blown up across the internet since the 2010s, including ones that focus on cooking.
Pan wants to use ASMR create a space of meditation and reverence for the invisible work happening in kitchens all around the world.
“We still crave the tactical layers of the cooking process, but we just don’t have time to make food,” she said. “I want to celebrate those sensational aspects in cooking that people who don’t cook don’t get to enjoy.”
Joining Pan in the theater are ten other Asian-American Pacific Islander performers, each with their own memories of making dumplings with loved ones.
One of those is Filipino cuisine chef Jan Parker, who is tasked with making the dough on stage.
“It’s a very laborious food to cook,” Parker said. “It’s a communal activity. Not only is it time to feed people, but it’s also time to talk [about] stories, talk about your day, or talk about your family members and just keep each other up to date.
While the other women prepare the ingredients on stage, performer Sophia Agtarap will walk around the stations with a camera displaying a live feed to the audience.
“I hope that through this experience, folks’ interest might be piqued to learn a little bit more about the foods that they love and the people who make them and the histories that come alongside them,” Agtarap said. “In this current climate where there’s so much othering and there’s so much focus on our differences, food can be a way that we can resist that notion to separate.”
Next week’s event is free to the public, and proceeds donated to the event will support the creation of a cookbook serving as a covert resource for immigrant rights and food justice.
If you want to try the dumplings you’ll have to wait until the second performance on Dec. 4 at the Tacoma Art Museum. There performers will cook and serve the dumplings to the sounds of a DJ set sampling the noises from the first event.
This story was originally published November 18, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
