2019: The Year According to MOLD Magazine's LinYee Yuan

To commemorate the year that was, we invited an array of artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, and performers to share a list of the most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects they encountered in 2019.

LinYee Yuan is the founder and editor of MOLD, a critically acclaimed print and online magazine about designing the future of food. Through original reporting, MOLD explores how designers can address the coming food crisis by creating products and systems that will help feed nine billion people by the year 2050. In addition to the website and a self-published bi-annual print magazine, MOLD hosts events and exhibitions, works with next generation food and lifestyle brands, and commissions products from emerging designers. LinYee was previously the entrepreneur in residence for QZ.com and an editor for Core77, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Theme Magazine. She has written about design and art for Food52, Design Observer, Cool Hunting, Elle Decor, and Wilder Quarterly.

1.
BEAN CLUB

This year marks my entrance into the only club I’ve ever wanted to be part of… the Rancho Gordo Bean Club. After being on the waiting list for over a year, I received my first shipment of beans at the end of October and have been dipping into the deliciously wonderful world of bean enthusiasts—to soak or not? cook with soaking water? When to salt? Pressure cook your beans: yay or nay? The heirloom beans at Rancho Gordo are especially delicious because the company focuses on beans and grains from the Americas and the beans they sell are young (usually only picked a season or two ago) so they taste fresh! I’m looking forward to cooking up my black eyed peas to usher in the new year and expanding my bean palette beyond the black/white/red bean conundrum.

2.
THE FAREWELL

When I first saw the trailer for Lulu Chang’s film, The Farewell, I laughed not because it seemed so absurd, but because it seemed so familiar. As a first generation Chinese American, to watch Billi’s family dynamics and the layered relationship we have with ideas of “home” unfold on a big screen made me feel simultaneously vulnerable and proud. In a time of anti-immigrant, xenophobic sentiment, it’s even more important for all of us to connect with the complex emotional centers that make us human. Chang makes this big task seem easy through her wry, heartfelt, uplifting, small story made universal.

3.
HILMA AF KLINT: PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE

Who knew that a pioneer of abstract art was a late 19th-century Swedish mystic who participated in seances with a group of women called “The Five”? It wasn’t until the Guggenheim’s blockbuster survey that I learned about af Klint and realized that the spiritual aesthetics at the turn of the 20th century—coinciding with scientific discoveries of the atom, X-rays and radio waves—sought to grapple with many of the same esoteric questions we face today. From existential threats to the blossoming of scientific and technological inquiry, understanding much of our world requires new ways of knowing. As creatives, our most urgent task should be to visualize/materialize the unseen forces that define our reality today.

4.
BJÖRK’S CORNUCOPIA

Despite my conflicted feelings about the Vessel and the politics behind the Hudson Yards development, I have spent more time this year at The Shed, its anchor performiomg arts venue, than any other arts space in New York City. When I heard that its creative director, Alexander Poots, commissioned a piece from Björk, I was sold. Cornucopia is a multidimensional ecological opera packaged as a concert production. From the Calabi-Yau inspired visual models that unfurl in an endless, mathematical utopia, to the ways that the artist conjures up the divine feminine through costuming, set design, and her cohort of collaborators both onstage and off, Björk opened my eyes to the ways in which one’s artistry can be a weapon for instigating other futures. Read the text to her manifesto, which she projected mid-performance, here.

5.
@LEGENDAIRYMILK

I became a mother this year and beyond the gratitude I feel for my friends and family, I feel a deep camaraderie with thousands of lactating strangers through the IG account of Legendairy Milk, an Austin-based lactation supplement company. The knowledge gleaned from their posts, live chats, and comments from other breastfeeding people is deeply informative, supportive, and often hilarious. It also raises the infuriating issue of IG’s nipple algorithm—can’t we all agree to #freethenipple?

6.
JIA TOLENTINO’S TRICK MIRROR

There was a time when I used to read the New Yorker cover to cover each week on my train ride to and from work. I would often find myself drifting up to the byline when reading a certain type of culture piece to find that it was penned by Jia Tolentino, who I imagined was an acquaintance in our small village of New York City. Tolentino, who is also a first generation Asian American with Houston roots, has an ability to craft incisive critiques of our cultural moment with a certain kind of candor and tenacity. Her first collection of essays, Trick Mirror is smart, funny and deeply personal—from the ways she name checks some of my favorite Houston rappers to her opening essay on internet culture. I read the book in fits and starts as I transitioned into motherhood and its narrative will always accompany my recollections of 2019.

7.
FANTASTIC FUNGI

In 2015 I heard the mycologist Paul Stamets speak in a talk that changed my life. Not only did he illuminate our evolutionary relationship with fungi and practical applications, but when he mapped mycelial networks over neural and then digital networks, he unlocked a new level in my brain. Now a fantastic documentary about fungi, conveniently titled Fantastic Fungi, is touring and it’s a great intro to the intelligence and unknown complexities behind a fungal future.

8.

INTERSPECIES POLITICS

A thread I have been pulling on all year unravels ways in which we might understand our place in this world as inextricably linked to complex webs of living (see Fantastic Fungi, above) and nonliving things. Many indigenous cultures hold this worldview, and I was deeply inspired by botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, and the ways she wove scientific understanding with indigenous knowledge about land stewardship and complex ecologies. Paola Antonelli’s Broken Nature exhibition at the Triennale in Milan highlighted the myriad ways that designers are unpacking this question at various scales. Rafi Youatt, a professor at Parsons where I learned about his work, opened my eyes into strategies being employed for according “nature” with political rights. And finally, this conversation between Donna Haraway (GOAT!) and iGEM co-founder Drew Endy about the tools needed to move towards “a more equitable, sustainable future for all people, species and ecosystems” should be required reading. Check out the entire JoDS issue on Other Biological Futures edited by two of the most brilliant designers working today, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Natsai Audrey Chieza.

9.

STEVIE WONDER’S SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS x SOLANGE’S “WHEN I GET HOME”

I’ve always been a bit of a crazy plant lady but as we round the corner into a new decade, I realize I’m only getting started. Thanks to my friend Duane’s WFMU show, I went all in on Stevie Wonder’s Journey through “The Secret Life of Plants,” a soundtrack he produced for the film of the same title. Besides the single, “Send One Your Love,” the soundtrack is quite experimental and I sensed a kinship with this 1979 record and Solange’s 2019 When I Get Home—both are sequels to larger projects and leave a lot of space for feeling and mood. BONUS if you went to artist Adrienne Adar’s installation “Sonic Succulents: Plant Sounds and Vibrations” at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens or copped the Sacred Bones reissue of Mort Garson’s 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia!

10.
DIASPORA CO.

Could our lives be more delicious if we indulged in ethically produced, hyperlocal flavors? Diaspora Co. is modeling ways for small producers and small business owners to create more equity in the food supply chain. This queer, immigrant, womyn-owned and operated business delivers a depth of flavor to the pantry that can only happen with seasonal, single-origin ingredients that reflect a specific history and landscape. What started in 2017 as a vision to decolonize the spice trade with a fresh ground pragati turmeric from Andhra Pradesh has blossomed in 2019 into offerings of guntur sannam chilli, baraka green cardamom, and, most recently, aranya peppercorn. Founder Sana Javeri Kadri works unceasingly to create more justice in this world—in August she launched a healthcare pilot for the 25 women who cultivate the turmeric on their partner farm—while sharing flavors of heirloom spices from her native India.