The ‘you are what you eat’ concept is the driving force behind Beijing-based food photographer Yum Tang’s compelling series Food Monster: portraits of faces covered in food… truly a monstrous sight to behold, and one we can’t tear our eyes away from.
Tang says that the Food Monster mirrors her reverse thinking about food. “I have always been taking pictures of the beauty of food,” she explains. “”I have been thinking about the relationship between food and people since 2019. This Coronavirus incident has deepened my understanding of it.” From consumerist tendencies to uncontrolled desires for wild and exotic tastes, food has ignited an emotional reaction in us all, its easy availability resulting in mindless devouring. Tang’s work is a visual metaphor of this blatant consumption. Slathered in meats, fish, or desserts, her food-laden subjects perfectly encapsulate the excess of it all, each one a reminder of how we treat food as “an object of filling desire instead of hunger” until the tables turn and it is we, in the end, who are consumed.
See the rest of the series here.
Images © Yum Tang / with permission