yidanchen928@gmail.com
In this photographic series, I remake food shapes that belong to very different cultural lineages—spring rolls, sushi, zongzi, dumplings—but I fill them with butter instead of what they’re supposed to hold.
The forms stay recognizable for a moment, carrying the familiarity of how they’re usually folded and wrapped, yet something feels immediately off.
Butter doesn’t know how to behave here. It bulges and softens, slipping out of place, as if the material itself is confused by the structure it’s trying to inhabit.
What interests me is that brief moment before everything collapses: when the shape still remembers where it came from, but the inside has already drifted.
These forms function like small containers of identity, but their contents don’t align with the histories that shaped them.
Photographing them becomes a way to catch that uneasy interval—when something looks right from a distance but is already becoming something else.
It isn’t parody. It’s more of a quiet observation of what happens when a borrowed form has to hold a body that doesn’t quite fit.
yidanchen928@gmail.com
Instagram：chenyidan02