Motion Graphics / Documentary Photography

Food is love. Food is life.

This project documents three years of my daughter’s lunch boxes and leftovers, treating them as an ongoing, intimate conversation between us. Through this daily exchange of preparing, packing, eating, and returning food, the work explores giving and receiving as forms of care, and reveals the power embedded in repetition within a mother’s domestic labor.

The experimental animation focuses on repetition and the flow of time between offering and response. By juxtaposing the quantity of food I prepare with what remains uneaten, the work visualizes both abundance and absence, intention and outcome. My daughter is an American-born Chinese, and her preference for Western food often contrasts with my own attachment to home-cooked Chinese meals. These differing tastes reflect the cultural distance shaped by migration and generation—subtle yet persistent negotiations embedded in everyday care.

Across cultures, domestic labor and caregiving are often framed as a mother’s primary responsibility and dismissed as low-value or meaningless repetition. This project challenges that assumption by foregrounding the emotional, cultural, and physical labor sustained through routine acts. Cooking, cleaning, hugging, and loving may appear simple, but their repetition forms the foundation of family life. Through food as both material and metaphor, Dear Lunchboxes honors the quiet strength of maternal labor and asks viewers to reconsider how care, love, and value are measured within the family.