A Feast

A Feast celebrates abundance and choice in eating, with images of food and utensils arrayed across the length of the sixty-foot scroll. Calligraphy surrounds and fills the spaces between the images, illustrating recipes that are inspired by the images but not directly connected to the dishes the artist depicts.

The scroll begins with an essay, composed by a friend of the artist over email, about the importance of food in Chinese culture, politics and history. Halfway through, the scroll interjects vivid images of Chinese cuisine, utensils and ingredients, which form the core of the scroll. We first encounter cooked dishes--a whole steamed crab served on a plate, prawns with fried eggs, Shaoxing rice wine, a hotpot, a pot of soup, sliced meat--and then find uncooked foodstuff skewered on sticks that is to be cooked in the hotpot. These two parts of the scroll illustrate what a real Chinese feast might entail, but the logic of the feast then gives way to an increasingly random selection of dishes that are sometimes depicted humorously. The chickens' open eyes, for example, suggest that they are still alive, although the birds are dead, disjoined and served on a dish. The presence of the sandwich is also odd because it would never be served alongside cooked dishes that are consumed with chopsticks. With the depiction of a large pig head and entrails (toward the end of the scroll), the images become more graphic and bold. The scroll ends with the second half of the essay and the artist's admonition, "Eat as much as you can."