Traditional Taste

As a mathematics major student, learning mathematics inspired me to think about the transformations and associations among different shapes and to find the interaction between art and mathematics. Therefore, I started creating motion graphic animations. I want to break down the boundaries between the real world and the virtual world and between tradition and innovation.

This project, Traditional Taste, contains five motion graphic animations that introduce traditional Chinese festival food. The inspiration arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. When I am abroad alone, especially during holidays, I miss my parents’ cooking. In China, we eat certain foods for every holiday, and I have followed that tradition since I was a child.

Festivals are the most concentrated embodiment of a national culture. I decided to explore traditional Chinese culture from the perspective of festival food preparation. Food that was once served as an offering to the gods for good fortune is now eaten during certain festivals as a cultural continuation. Many people ignore the traditional culture, while in fact, even today we still live in the traditional way.

Any traditional culture is bound to have a profound impact on the development of art and technology, so I used animation to reinterpret traditional food making from a modern perspective, which is also my attempt at augmented reality art. I use green screen to combine elements of the real world with hand-drawn graphics.