This is Illegal in Singapore (Diam Leh)

2023–ongoing

This is Illegal in Singapore (Diam Leh) is an ongoing performance and participatory project that begins with a simple gesture: inviting a stranger into the artist's home for a home-cooked meal.

Since 2023, Lu Lei has hosted private meals with participants in London, cooking dishes shaped by their tastes, dietary needs, or cultural associations. Over the course of each meal, conversation becomes the work's central material. Participants might speak about family, migration, belonging, memory, or language—or simply whatever occupies them in the moment. The meal becomes a temporary space in which strangers negotiate intimacy, trust, and the possibility of being heard.

Fragments of these encounters are later translated into recipes and menus, forming an evolving archive of Recipe Relics. Conventional culinary instructions become interwoven with personal histories, memories, and reflections, so that the recipe shifts from a set of instructions into a record of an encounter.

The title draws on the Singaporean expression "diam leh"—roughly, "keep quiet" or "shut up"—setting up a tension between speech and silence. What begins as the intimate act of eating together becomes a way of asking what can be said, who is permitted to speak, and how everyday acts of care might open space for otherwise unheard voices.

Rather than treating food as a fixed marker of cultural identity, the project approaches eating as a form of translation: a way of encountering another person through taste, memory, language, and conversation.