work statement
Around the Kitchen Table is a hand drawn animation short on the daily rituals performed around a childhood kitchen table. In Chinese culture, the circular shape symbolizes harmony and using that as the main visual base, hands fade in and out, executing the everyday tasks. With each bowl of congee eaten, each watermelon split, and each mooncake made; another day is marked, another season is completed, and another generation rises to continue the performance.
The project explores the concept of memory of labour, the idea that the action of making food together is what strengthens family relationships and solidifies cultural identity. When the process of united labour is lost, the connection to family and culture fades along with it. Frame by frame in a medium that is also labour based, the animation commemorates the mundane and everyday actions that accumulates into a cycle of life.
Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen, situated above a grocery store and near a funeral home, is the ideal place to premiere this animated film. Around the Kitchen Table slows down the fast pace urban environment to a rhythm that is simple, holistic, and lost in modernity. By performing the daily rituals of life, it becomes a way of honouring the generations who laboured before us.
artist bio
Wen Wen (Cherry) Lu is a Chinese Canadian multimedia artist interested in exploring the hidden, the small, and the forgotten through installation, illustration, and animation. Taking inspiration from family history, she seeks to combine it with the present experiences of culture, nature, and community to create something that questions.