Jenie Gao
Madison , WI
https://www.jenie.org/
IG: jeniegao

Three Generations Happy Family
2023
Inkjet print on 80-lb matte copy paper
8.5 x 11 inches unfolded, 8.5 x 3.2 inches folded

Artist Statement

Three Generations Happy Family is an artist’s book designed to resemble a Chinese takeout menu.

What warrants an object to the elevated status of a valued cultural object?

Designed to resemble a takeout menu, this artist’s book contains a timeline of my familial history told via food as a political and socioeconomic indicator. My father survived China’s Great Famine, a tragedy that claimed 55 million lives. My mother endured malnutrition under food rationing in Taiwan, during the longest period of Martial Law prior to Syria.

Years later, in the United States, the takeout restaurant became an economic stepping stone that enabled the chain migration of my family. That first restaurant was also the meeting place of my Taiwanese mother and Chinese father, in a re-stitching of identity that happens as a direct result of colonialism and diaspora. In a strange, somewhat cruel twist of fate, food service became one of the few job opportunities available to my parents in the United States.

Yet there is also something profound about my parents experiencing such intense trauma around food scarcity in their youth—and then distributing food as a means of transforming our family’s trajectory. When I was a child, my mother told me that she and her parents opened a restaurant specifically because she was pregnant with me, because they knew the difference between working in a restaurant versus getting to own the fruits of their labor.

Three Generations Happy Family is part of the body of work, 米 (mǐ) uncooked rice. 米 (mǐ) is the Chinese word for uncooked rice, or the seed grain itself, a metaphor for that which could sustain us, but in its unprocessed form is indigestible.