Rice & Resilience: Colorado’s API Food Culture

april 16, 2022-april 30, 2023 at history colorado

visual art and storytelling exhibition curated by the japanese arts network

Rice & Resilience … celebrates Colorado's Asian Food Culture through reflections by artists and community members to highlight the importance of food and food legacy as it continues to be passed down through generations.

My contributions to this exhibit were two pieces, "Nourishment” (ink on watercolor paper) and “My Lunchbox Memory Spirit House” (mixed media).  “Nourishment” is a piece that explores the concept of feeding the soul. Food is prepared and eaten in community, stories are told, wisdom is exchanged, medicine is shared. For me, the magic of food is that it is a vehicle for culture, stories and tradition. There are countless individuals needed to facilitate, to cultivate, to market, to cook, etc.  A single morsel of food carries the voices and energy of thousands.  

A "lunchbox moment" refers to the experience of being judged for the cultural food you bring to school as a child or even the workplace as an adult.  "My Lunchbox Memory Spirit House" is made from an old lunchbox of mine. It is created as a safe space for the spirit of my memory - the inner child that holds the hurt of my “lunchbox moment”, as well as the healing that followed. In traditional Japanese spirituality, a mirror is the closest visual representation of truth and spirit, as it merely reflects what is already there. I used a mirror in the back of lunchbox and other mirror-like silver items to bounce around the images on the cranes and play with the idea of reflection. The candles and seaweed furikake are offerings to my lunchbox memory spirit. Pages from "Yoko" by Rosemary Wells and seaweed were used in this piece as they were specific to my "lunchbox moment".