To celebrate their 100th interview with Chinese food personalities around the world, Celestial Peach, a platform for diasporic East/South East Asian narratives, commissioned me to visualise 4 of the interviewees' answers to "What does home taste like?".
All 4 artworks (along with 96 other commissioned pieces) are exhibited online and printed as postcards to be sold to raise funds for the London Chinese Community Centre in the UK.
“I am Peranakan (sometimes known as Straits Chinese) – my Fujianese ancestors settled in Southeast Asia some centuries ago, absorbing local influences (and genes) into their families, culture and language. So our cuisine bears traces of Southern China, Southeast Asia and colonial legacies, for example in ‘itek tim’, a duck and salted mustard green soup with chillies, tomatoes, pickled plums, dried garcinia fruit (asam keping), peppercorns and nutmeg. So home for me tastes like intricate spicing and carefully layered flavours, whose interplay resonates for a long time on the palate.”
“Whatever my wife Cindy and I are cooking that day/night. She grows over 200 herbs, vegetables and fruits on our property, so our home will get a seasonal veggie and fruit scent.”
“My mother's silkie chicken soup. It's a beautiful dish that has a shiny black chicken floating in a clear broth, bright orange-red goji berries, dried scallops, a smattering of ginger. This is the welcome home dish. It's also the, where's my grandchildren dish, the I love you dish, the don't sleep too late or you'll have wrinkles dish, the goodbye dish before I leave Taiwan.”
“Pear blossoms in spring, foraged wild mushroom in summer, persimmons and walnuts in the fall, cured ham and spicy sausages in winter, rice noodle soups year round.”
Check out the full showcase here!
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