As someone who is endlessly fascinated by the connections people form with food, whether they be cooking or eating it, I used paper to explore the connections made in the process of transforming a recipe into food. My sculpture especially aims to explore the cultural implications behind food and how such foods are manifested as recipes on paper and transformed from text.
As a Taiwanese American, I have grown up mindlessly accepting the Chinese meals my mother cooked or the familiar dishes served at our favorite Chinese and Taiwanese eateries. In recent years, I have developed a love for cooking and baking, through which I have familiarized myself with following recipes from books and paper printouts. Yet, I had never actively sought out the recipes for the Chinese meals I grew up eating. Seeing the recipes for the home-cooked foods we are so familiar with on paper in text form provides a completely different perspective and level of complexity to the relationship that we have with such foods.
The defined exterior of the book creates the illusion of a tabletop or place setting. In crafting the separate foods, I used various folding techniques with cardstock, construction, and tissue paper to form representational shapes.