3 Independent Picture Books About Eating, 5 Playful Art Projects About People | Great Little Studios

Watching, recording, sorting, making, without stopping — all of it comes naturally.

For Da Gua, a Beijing woman, watching, recording, sorting and making things around anything to do with eating comes naturally, and there is no mysterious motive hiding behind it. Besides making books, she stages playful art projects and invites people in to experience them. Her friend Shanshan puts it this way: "Da Gua is always bursting with ideas."

Li Yuexi is her real name, but friends online and the people she knows in independent publishing prefer to call her Da Gua. Many of them met over the internet through shared tastes.

《吃的 reallywant》 is an independent publication Da Gua and Shanshan started five years ago at a table in a McDonald's. In this palm-sized book, the subject is simply eating. Three issues have come out so far.

Family memory plays a large part in it. Readers from northern China will find food scenes they know: Daoxiangcun pastries kept in Grandpa's fridge, squirrel-shaped mandarin fish on the menus of fashionable restaurants in the 1990s, snapshots of four generations living together in a hutong courtyard, the many ways to cook tomato with egg.

"Half-yuan snacks for grade-schoolers" is one of the subjects they treat as a field of study. Last October, at the Picnic Art Festival in Shanghai, Da Gua brought 《吃的 reallywant》 there and opened a "Chinese Spicy Strips Restaurant" that ran for two days only. The place was lively: people queued up to order for themselves, and each set meal came with one main dish and two sides — all of them spicy strips, the chewy latiao snack.

Other things they have done along the same lines: building a "Dumpling Tower," rephotographing "trash cans full of food packaging," running a pick-your-own snack shop that sold by weight, and eating a meal in ten different homes.

Both women grew up in Beijing, and both have been interested in food since childhood. Da Gua still eats regularly at homegrown Chinese versions of Western fast food; Shanshan's childhood dream was to be a cook. A few years ago, after graduating, Da Gua decided to stay on at the bookstore where she had interned, buying foreign-edition books. "I couldn't bring myself to leave after work — I'd look through art books until closing at 8 or 9." It was a period when she took in a great deal of information about foreign culture. "Japanese magazines started paying attention to everyday ways of living very early on," she recalled.

The idea of making a book took shape. Da Gua wanted a magazine about eating, but one that wasn't too pretty — "food magazines are all too unreal." She wanted to fill that gap in taste, and at the same time to use food to study the different traces people leave in their lives.

She went to Shanshan — "she has a particular feel for the things around her, and I liked the angles she shot from" — and after a few conversations the two clicked. 《吃的 reallywant》 was Shanshan's idea for the name: "I came up with it off the top of my head, but I never expected it to turn out so simple, direct and warm, with something genuine and urgent in it."

The first issue came together quickly. Six months later the two of them used their own savings to print 1,000 copies, and gradually placed the little books in shops they liked.

"Steamed-bun shops, cafes, bookstores, bars, underground rock venues — these are all small places we genuinely like. We wanted 《吃的 reallywant》 to show up where people are actually eating, to become part of everyday life. That's also one of the reasons the very first issue was free," Da Gua said. After that, shop owners in Guangzhou, Chengdu, Qingdao and other cities invited the book into their spaces.

In the second issue, beyond food itself, the act of eating brought in a wider range of social groups, working conditions and daily habits. Da Gua sees this as something that flows naturally out of ordinary life.

They visited the nighttime "taxi drivers' home" — the streets and village lanes where drivers gather to rest — and spent two years collecting the work lunches of people in different jobs, a series they called "business lunch," recording what particular people ate and how they lived inside their working days.

On March 31, 2015, for instance, Da Gua posted five photos taken by the subject herself and wrote:

"This is Yang Lijun, a married mother and a ticket seller on the No. 300 bus, and her lunches from the past week. She may have the strangest working hours in the world: she only goes out on the bus during the morning and evening rush hours, which lets her eat at home with her family, or go out to eat with her husband, without any fuss."

They also went out to find new places themselves, using a single technique — "observation."

"Wherever expensive office towers cluster together, you can always find a mysterious cheap place to eat. This one is near Chaoyangmen, inside an underground supermarket: one bowl of noodles, three kinds of gravy, only 12 yuan." Da Gua posted that on Weibo under the hashtag #business lunch on December 29, 2016, with photos of gravy noodles and young office workers eating in a hurry.

At the end of 2017, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale invited Da Gua to do a residency at Dameisha, a well-known seaside spot in Shenzhen. The organizers left her free, on one condition: research the local urban village and make a small book out of it. She had a budget that covered basic living costs.

She moved into an urban village behind the seaside resort area, taking an empty room in one of its buildings. Bit by bit she got to know the villagers there, who had come from every corner of the country, and lived among them, recording and sorting the food and the lives she found in different households over 82 days in Dameisha village.

The book, the third in the 《吃的 reallywant》 series, is called My Home Is in Dameisha (《我家就在大梅沙》).

82 Days in Residence in Dameisha Village

Facing an empty room after she moved in, Da Gua was not sure of herself. She had to knock on people's doors, eat with them in their homes, watch what they ate and gather material.

She walked the streets to get her bearings and told people what she was there for, but no one took her up on it. "You really can't offer the other person anything. I'd go back and question what exactly I was doing, and then the next morning I'd wake up and, thick-skinned as ever, go talk to the residents again."

In the end it was the village children who knocked on Da Gua's door first. They warmed to her fastest. Every day at around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, "the kids, just out of school, showed up right on time," and now and then they brought small presents: an ice cream tub with a hermit crab in it, a small lotus leaf, a plastic bag of flower petals, half-yuan snacks.

"They're a bit different from city kids — the whole neighborhood is their playground, they run around everywhere, and their parents don't hold them back much," Da Gua said.

On her third day there, Da Gua threw a birthday party for Chuanchuan, one of the people in the book. She stayed up through the night making posters, and that day a lot of children and parents came; the villagers began to hear about this new place.

Da Gua began knocking on the children's doors, and was invited in for lunch. She ate more than one meal in ten households in the village, and stepped into their lives. In Dameisha village in Shenzhen she ate home cooking from Hubei, Hunan, Shaanxi, Henan and Sichuan, capturing each dish on her phone and writing down every family's story.

The opening note of My Home Is in Dameisha reads:

"Almost everyone in Shenzhen knows 'Dameisha.' It's a seaside resort area developed early on here, with a beach, many hotels, a shopping mall and any number of restaurants large and small. But not everyone knows 'Dameisha village.' It lies quietly right behind that whole stretch of Dameisha hotels, and the people who live there are the ones who keep the resort's facilities running. They came from all over, looking for more work, and some married, had children and settled down. Through every sunrise and sunset, every high tide and low tide, people here are living real lives."

The cover shows plastic bags hung on the wall of a Dameisha village home, a scene found in almost every household: people hang the bags up after shopping and take them down when they need one.

Da Gua collected photographs by watching, chatting, staking out a spot and asking the children. Usually around dusk she would walk to the entrance of Dameisha village, buy something from the same Sichuan cold-dish stall each time, and sit outside on a plastic chair drinking beer. Many snack carts came out at that hour, which was also when people got off work and children came home from school.

"There's also a Northeastern flatbread stall where a few people from the Northeast often sit around talking — like Dameisha village's own Northeastern CAFÉ." It was in these hours that she gathered the photographs that make up the book's table of contents.

Min'an Department Store is one grocery destination the book singles out, and it holds all the ways local residents solve the problems of daily life. Da Gua believes the fastest way to understand a town is to look at the corner shops in its neighborhoods; it has become a habit. "If a corner shop sells pots and pans, there are usually a lot of guesthouses nearby. If what sells best is liquor and instant noodles, then a lot of people around there do especially heavy work, because at midday they want a drink to loosen up."

This was a farewell thank-you banquet given by 《吃的 reallywant》.

Da Gua asked the Sichuanese grandfather from one of the households to be the cook, with hot pot from all over the country as the theme. She wanted to reproduce her own experience as an outsider, and let the villagers taste one another's hometown food. They ate late into the night before the children and their families finally went home.

That night Da Gua tore the posters off her walls, and at noon the next day she left Dameisha village.

They have done a number of other imaginative things, too:

1. "You can tell how someone is living just by looking at their trash can"

It's a New Era, and I Photographed All 124 Trash Cans in Building A of Our School's Boys' Dorm (《新时代了，我拍下了我们学校男生宿舍 A 栋所有 124 个垃圾桶》) was the first photo book 《吃的 reallywant》 made. On the night of November 22, 2014, a male college student named Zhan Qi photographed all 124 trash cans in his dormitory with a camera; the pictures were later collected into a book.

"Collecting trash cans" is something Da Gua and Shanshan have kept doing. They believe trash cans hold many of people's secrets, and that they are even a kind of metaphor: the confused state of Zhan Qi's college life shows in the impulse that made him photograph 124 boys' dorm trash cans, as if people were throwing their desires away.

More simply, a trash can shows directly what someone has just eaten, and refracts the traces and habits of a life — that is what interests the two of them most. In one interview, Da Gua said: "While we were collecting material for the trash can series, a friend sent me a photo of a trash can with the wrapper from a candied-hawthorn stick inside. A few days later I saw on her Moments that she was eating candied hawthorn again, and I thought, so she really does like it."

2. "Every resident of Dumpling Tower is a little different"

Dumpling Tower is a playful story that made it all the way from idea to practice, an art project 《吃的 reallywant》 did with Tannaomen Space.

The idea came from the first time Da Gua went to a friend her own age to wrap dumplings and noticed that everyone shaped them a little differently. "Dumplings are like an unintentional medium, holding on to each family's secrets. The shape your hands pinch out without thinking gives away who you are and where you're from."

So they decided to build the dumplings a tower and invite different friends to move in. To make the scene more convincing, they mounted a lit-up American-style sign, "House of Dumplings," on top of a transparent acrylic building. Once a resident's homemade dumpling moved in, it got a key with a room number and a small property deed. There were 108 rooms in all.

On December 27, three of them rode out on a red tricycle with Dumpling Tower loaded on the back. That day they visited ten homes of friends and people they knew online, and met more than 40 people.

At the end of the night, Da Gua and Shanshan wrote: "Going door to door to collect dumplings showed us all kinds of scenes, introduced us to many new friends, and netted us a batch of strange dumplings in one go. There are still 65 empty rooms."

The project ran from the beginning of the year to the end, and finished at the Tiantao vegetable market in Dashilar, Beijing. "Dashilar really was a vegetable market once. It isn't anymore, but there are still a lot of neighbors around. That day they thought there might be vegetables inside, so they wandered in. There was a pretty cool grandmother who seemed to have come only to buy vegetables, and she wrapped a dumpling while she was at it, quick and neat about it."

What happened over the course of "Dumpling Tower" was also turned into an exhibition.

3. The Spicy Strips Restaurant

At the Picnic Art Festival held in Shanghai last October, Da Gua brought 《吃的 reallywant》 there and opened a "Chinese Spicy Strips Restaurant" that ran for two days only. The restaurant offered 16 dishes and a full spicy-strips menu; visitors ordered for themselves, and each set meal came with one main dish and two sides, all of them spicy strips. It may have been the most popular interactive program at the show that day.

For it, Da Gua tasted dozens of spicy-strip snacks and built a "spicy strips archive," matching every flavor to a real dish name, from regional specialties to chicken, duck, fish and pork.

By building this slightly absurd but convincing replica — ordering, eating — and letting visitors walk in and feel it for themselves, 《吃的 reallywant》 asked a question: "If even something as ordinary as spicy strips can be used to open a restaurant, then what can't be turned into a restaurant? What kind of imagination are we consuming and manufacturing?"

4. A reader's "Heart Discovery Project"

Mai Tang Jun, a longtime reader and friend of 《吃的 reallywant》, gradually collected 500 everyday photographs with heart shapes in them. In December 2017, Da Gua printed them out and took them to a general-culture market in Beijing in the winter.

On the flyer they wrote: "The heart is a symbol of love invented by human beings, and only human beings can read it. In a consumer society, people use it and manipulate it to drum up business and stoke the urge to buy. But in everyday life there are also plenty of hearts that form of their own accord. They decorate the three ordinary meals of the day, and woven together they make a rich picture. Every stroke is a trace of a person."

5. The Eyes of Youth

This was the first project through which Da Gua began to express herself around people, though it stopped when the blog site's server was shut down.

In 2013, freshly graduated, Da Gua set up a blog called "The Eyes of Youth" to collect portraits of teenagers looking straight into the camera, together with what those people actually went through in their teens, using questionnaires, interviews and photo collections to look back at how adults saw the world in high school.

The material, which Da Gua sorted several years ago, comes from the subjects' own accounts of adolescence, with real names and backgrounds, including private or period-specific emotional experiences. She believes adolescence "is when a person is especially sensitive and most easily swayed"; the stage when the sense of self is strongest is frozen there too, yet people rarely look back at it or think about it once they are adults.

"Once I've collected enough material to call it an archive, I'll let actual high school students know about it — put it somewhere like the corner shop or the toy store window by a school gate — so that when they need to work something out or fill an empty hour, they'll find it."

Inspiration and the Realities

"Wandering around" is an answer Da Gua often gives when she is asked about inspiration. In a bad mood she will walk all the way to the old book building at Xidan, sit down in the milk tea shop on the fourth floor and order a cup of milk tea. On work trips to Shandong she likes to wander the wholesale markets for dried fruit and dried seafood, then carry home a bag of loose snacks. Back when she worked at the bookstore, she stayed on after her shift to look through art books until closing, then walked an hour home. She loved that time.

At the start of last year she left the bookstore where she had worked on and off for five or six years, and now works on 《吃的 reallywant》 full-time. In between she takes freelance jobs and helps interesting, creative friends with interviews and writing, but "life is still pretty hard."

Last year, though, 《吃的 reallywant》 took part in many independent book fairs and art markets, and the owners of certain cultural spaces are now taking it abroad to exhibit; its reach is growing. What satisfied Da Gua most over the year was "watching 《吃的 reallywant》 get liked by more and more people, building up bit by bit, one step at a time."

Not long ago the location on Da Gua's Moments showed she had "wandered" off to Zhoushan; she was preparing interviews for a new 《吃的 reallywant》 series, "Going Home for New Year." One subject, nicknamed Dan Ta, once ran a dance hall on the fishing island she comes from, and the two of them dug up traces of the life fishermen used to lead there. Another project underway is "The Old People's Shop," about the elderly, though she wasn't willing to say more about it.

The banner and in-article images were provided by the interviewees; the long cover image is by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash.