A Hundred Ways to Photograph Food, All Found by Mining Its Talent for Acting | Great Little Studios

"Food has its own temperament!"

Lantos Studio believes every piece of food has its own distinct personality. Even the same apple takes on different possibilities in different settings — and that's what gives it its charm.

Working from that sense of each food's unique personality, Lantos Studio can turn a meal into a miniature world, a sweeping landscape, or the mysterious clue in a scene of suspense. This creative food studio, built mainly around graphic design, always manages to give food real presence in its work.

Lantos Studio is run by a husband-and-wife design duo, Liang Lanyi and Wang Jiawei. Liang Lanyi is outgoing by nature and excels at visual design and post-production. Wang Jiawei is comparatively reserved, and excels at handcrafted design, physical styling, and working with materials. Between them, the two handle almost all of Lantos Studio's design work, only bringing in interns or outside designers when a project's workload gets too heavy.

Before founding Lantos Studio in 2016, both worked as designers at companies, often collaborating on food-related design projects as the job required. Over time, food became an important prop in their working lives — and it was around then that Liang Lanyi and Wang Jiawei discovered food's personality.

"The same food has infinite possibilities in different settings," Liang Lanyi says. "From raw ingredients to processed food, from fresh to rotten — even the differences between China and abroad give food multiple faces. That makes me look at food differently from how a chef does. I can't perform that possibility through taste, so I try to perform it visually instead."

Precisely because food is such a basic thing, it works in Lantos Studio's favor — both for keeping production costs down and for widening the audience. Early on, when settling on a theme for a piece, they'll sometimes spread open a big encyclopedia and talk it through.

As soon as Lantos Studio was founded, it launched a WeChat official account under the same name, where most of its work is published. The account is organized into three main columns by content and theme: FOOD GAMER, Superb Recipe, and EDIBLE THEATRE.

FOOD GAMER mainly turns everyday materials into food — it was the column they chose for the studio's very first post, cooking up tempting, inedible-looking noodles out of ordinary household objects. In this series, rubber tubing becomes macaroni, pompoms become fried noodles, cotton rope becomes hand-pulled noodles — and nearly all of these materials came straight from the studio itself.

"The fun of this column is using things that aren't food to express food-ness — it breaks people's familiar sense of what food looks like," Liang Lanyi explains. "The hardest part is adapting to all kinds of materials — whenever we don't know a material, we have to learn it from scratch."

Superb Recipe leans harder into visual effect, aiming above all to look good. For this column, Lantos Studio shoots and arranges foods of similar color palettes together to make "epics," often using different foods' shapes and lengths to build a "miniature world."

The project grew out of ideas Liang Lanyi and Wang Jiawei had while cooking at home. "We're not professional chefs, but we still wanted to share the food, or the visual result of making it, with everyone."

EDIBLE THEATRE is the column Lantos Studio updates most often, and the "heaviest" part of the studio's design output. Here, food becomes the protagonist of a story, or the key element that carries it — the plot matters just as much as the food.

Hotel of Fleeting Life is one of the more representative works in this column. Lantos Studio designed distinct rooms for a prostitute, a fugitive, a killer, and a witch, each living in the hotel behind a different door number, each linked to a unique slice of life told through food.

"Food has its own temperament!" Liang Lanyi offers an example. "Say, a moldy piece of bread — you can just feel a kind of poverty coming off it. Nobody minds it, nobody eats it, it just gets wasted, quietly, because it's only a slice of bread. But what about a jar of caviar? You can feel from the price alone that its nature is completely different. So you can put these fundamentally different airs that food carries to work telling different stories."

Liang Lanyi loves detective novels, and both she and Wang Jiawei love movies. She compares her work to directing: "Ingredients are my actors, to me. I let them perform whatever script or story I have — that's how I think of my relationship with them."

The confined framework of detective fiction is what fascinates Liang Lanyi most — "Agatha Christie would trap a group of people on a small island." Out of that love for detective stories, Lantos Studio likes to confine a story to one small setting and then express it through food. That setting could be a hotel, a barbershop, a supermarket; the mood could be intimate, terrifying, or tender. "Food is truly marvelous — it can perform anything!"

"What we call acting talent is something food gives to itself. To us, food today is a whole cast of naturally gifted actors." So Liang Lanyi believes a "director's" job isn't to change the "actors," but to cast the right actor for the story, then build the right time and place to bring out that actor's character and qualities. "For a scene like the witch's room, we'd pick out ingredients that match a witch's character by color and condition — but we still have to place them in the right setting. Designing that setting is our job."

Table of Passion is another work in the EDIBLE THEATRE column, and also a piece Lantos Studio made for Okamoto. At the top of the post, Lantos Studio has readers click to play a soundtrack they made for the theme, then writes: "The film begins, please turn your palm over / Okamoto's long table of passion, awaits your meal."

Shot from directly overhead, this set of images moves through time to show the different tabletops of an office worker, a housewife's kitchen, and a samurai, among others, having their meals. Playing off Okamoto's product characteristics, the piece is full of playful innuendo. Liang Lanyi says a theme like sex is something Lantos Studio would take on even without a commercial brief, since sex, like food, is an inescapable part of life. Bringing people into the work also widened the range of what the work could present.

Before creating the piece, the couple went back and forth and drew up a long list — first setting the boundaries of time and place, then discussing what scenes people of different eras and occupations would occupy, then narrowing further by specific personality, before finally folding in elements of literature and film to settle on these scenarios.

When they're not working, Liang Lanyi and Wang Jiawei like watching movies — and puzzling over the special meaning behind different ingredients and props in film. "We'll screenshot the empty shots in movies. We shoot still lifes with no people in them, but we still need the story to feel like a story, or like news — so we often study how films do it, and pay attention to what, besides food, can carry the right emotional atmosphere."

Lantos Studio's official tagline is "China's most playful creative food studio." Liang Lanyi's own definition of that "playful spirit" is: "You need bold ideas, creativity that ordinary thinking wouldn't produce, results that emerge through the process of playing, and a sense of fun."

Creativity is the word Lantos Studio reaches for most often to explain itself, and it's also the standard they hold themselves to. It means, as they put it, "our work has to be different — it has to differ from what we've done before, too."

Beyond food, the other core of Lantos Studio's work is theme. Presentation, scene design, camera angle, and color all have to start from the scene — seen this way, Lantos Studio's design is really more like a language, all in service of telling what they actually mean to say.

Liang Lanyi, who handles the visual side of the design, says her color choices are highly subjective — she'll reach for vivid, high-saturation colors as readily as desaturated grays and whites.

"With a piece like Stone Eaters, we still start by thinking about what the atmosphere needs to express, then work out the color scheme from a purely visual, 'what looks good' angle. But if we swap in a different theme — say the protagonist becomes a young woman, and a young woman gets compared to a peach — then the work might lean heavily on pink to build that overall feeling. Color choice still comes down to the story and the theme."

The form Lantos Studio's work takes is also chosen mainly by story and theme. "Commercial collaborations ask for more miniature worlds, but really we're not tied to any single form of presentation. Composition and framing still have to connect to our content."

Lantos Studio once designed a piece called Astronaut's Log, in which an astronaut leaves footprints in cocoa powder, and sugar cubes and chocolate chips become planets in a solar system — a classic miniature-world treatment.

"For the astronaut theme, I needed to convey a huge space, so I could only use small objects to suggest that vastness — that's how you take something familiar and drop it into a totally different environment. Sometimes a piece about architecture also calls for a miniature world; in those cases we adjust based on the scale of the space. That's how we think through presenting different kinds of space — it still comes down to the content and the theme."

Producing a single piece takes Lantos Studio anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, and settling on the idea takes even longer. As Liang Lanyi and Wang Jiawei work out whether an idea is ready to move forward, new inspiration is constantly arriving, which stretches out — and makes hard to control — the time it takes an idea and theme to fully form. Plenty of ideas sit in their heads without ever quite clicking into something they can execute.

Once the idea and theme are clear enough to execute, Lantos Studio's first step is turning what's in their heads into text, sketching out a clear framework and structure. With the framework and structure in place, they settle on a color scheme, then draw rough sketches to match it, and put together a PDF to preview the result in advance.

Once the theme, story, content framework, and presentation are all worked out, Liang Lanyi and Wang Jiawei start choosing the right ingredients to cast as actors.

"There are generally two situations. One is that I already know exactly which ingredient I want, it's in season and available, so I can just go buy it. The other is that I don't know what ingredient to use, so I have to go to the market and see what fits the lead role in the story best."

Next comes "the most painful and grueling part of production": shooting. Looking back over past work, Liang Lanyi explains that suspending or fixing the food that looks so glossy and vivid in the finished shot is never simple — and given how quickly food spoils, they're constantly making adjustments on set that don't match what they'd planned; sometimes even one set of shots yields different results. "There's simply nothing to be done about certain things during production — we go back and adjust them in post."

"The hardest part is that we keep raising our own bar. Sometimes a friend will say it's already good enough, but we still want to try more. Following a fixed structure step by step is manageable — but with an open-ended subject, like architecture or furniture, there's no end to it."

"There are also surprises. During production we sometimes find that a totally ordinary food turns out so distinctive once it's shot — that's the fun of it."

To avoid waste, the couple try to eat everything after a shoot, sometimes inviting friends to join them. One lobster has lived in their home for nearly two years now; since it doesn't need to look fresh, they pull it out of the freezer whenever a shoot calls for a lobster, then refreeze it afterward — by now, it's become a "recurring cast member" in Lantos Studio's work.

In our interview, Liang Lanyi looked back on whether her and Wang Jiawei's view of food had changed since founding the studio. "We've learned all sorts of strange ways to preserve different ingredients... Abroad, we love wandering markets — visiting a market is like visiting a tourist site... We spend more time cooking now... And we've stopped fussing over plating — we only demand that of ourselves at work; in life, there's no need to be so exacting."

These days, some commercial clients approach Lantos Studio directly. The studio makes clear from the start that both sides keep their independence — whoever's commissioning the design has to sign off on Lantos Studio's reference direction being able to achieve the effect they want before any collaboration begins.

Today, Liang Lanyi and Wang Jiawei are still Lantos Studio's core staff, and Liang Lanyi counts that as one of the advantages of a husband-and-wife partnership.

"The best part is there's nothing we have to hide from each other when we share things. Having worked in a company before, I know creativity is inherently tied up with self-interest there — there's no getting around it. And it's hard to say who's contributing more or less on a creative project; everyone has to draw very clear lines, which gets exhausting. Between a couple, there's no clock and no money keeping score. We know each other well enough to predict how something will turn out. From a business standpoint, we're not just creative directors — we're the ones actually making the work, so we can deal with clients directly from start to finish, which saves a lot of time on communication."

As for the downsides, "there are just too many," Liang Lanyi says of the friction they run into while creating. "The biggest problem is we argue, and because we're both so deep inside the work, it's hard to judge what's actually good or bad."

"But even that friction has its upside — it pushes us to come up with something new. We're always creating, and making something together keeps reaffirming our trust in each other. We can each convince ourselves that this is exactly why it turned out well."

Cover image and in-body images courtesy of Lantos Studio