Motion Graphics / Documentary Photography

Food is love. Food is life.

I had documented my daughter’s lunch boxes and leftovers for three years. I treated it as a unique conversation between us. The conversation is about giving and receiving and showing the strength of repetition in a mother’s domestic work. 

This experimental animation focuses on repetition and the flow of time between giving and receiving. It is interesting to see the contrast between the amount of food I prepared for my daughter and how much she ate. She is an American-born Chinese. She has shown much more interest in Western food than my home-cooked Chinese food. As her mother, who was born and raised in China, I still prefer to have Chinese food. Our food preferences differ since we grew up in two different cultural backgrounds. 

Whether in the West or East, many people think a mother’s primary responsibility is to raise a child, and domestic work is considered a cheap and useless repetition. A child doesn’t need too much; food and love are two essential things that support them. When people judge a mother’s contribution to the family, they need to think about the strength of those simple repetitions a mother always does: cooking, cleaning, hugging, and loving.