TOFU & VIOLENCE

I didn't think much about tofu before Claire asked me to be involved in this project. For me it has always been a foodstuff. Something that was a bit"alternative" when I was growing up, and something I had come to appreciate more since coming to live in Hong Kong. We all set parameters around things. Food is, well, food. Clothing is clothing and furniture is furniture. But, when you think about it the last two can be anything but. Both clothing and furniture can be so much more. They can even aspire to being works of art.

But food products? Not really. So, I didn't know what to think as I approached this. But I had been thinking about my father who died in 1978 a lot recently. So I decided I would think about my relationship with him while I held the tofu. My plan was to think about how slippery and difficult a teenagers relationship with his father can be, and how, in hindsight, opportunities had slipped through my fingers. Opportunities that will never come back. I had expectations of what might happen. Some things did, some things didn't. What surprised me was the part that holding the tofu played. Rather than being an inactive prop it seemed to want to draw me into doing something with it. It substituted emotions that I felt but couldn't externalise at the time. It went from being an inanimate object to being something that, briefly, had a sense of life and loss.

- David

Picture taken by Claire for project Tofu & Violence

Mixed Media on Canvas

The work was chosen to exhibit at the Northern Arizona University Art Museum.
The exhibition is about Reflections on Politics, Violence, and Reconciliation. The tofu with a swan represents a moral sense and a human dignity, confronting the violent means. Tofu is a metaphor of gentleness and wisdom against violence.

Mur Nomade, Hong Kong

2014

I wrapped the canvas with my old bed sheet, wrote with ink a deconstructed Chinese character 白痴 (The Idiot), my 'protest' to the kind of abuse and violence I observed in a documentary on life in a mental asylum. I was struck by the image of them lying in beds all day. White beds with sleeping bodies packed the room, like bricks of tofu, harmless but lying as if dead. They are given no life before death.

It is also to remember Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 Japanese film Hakuchi 白痴 (The Idiot).

A blood-stained kitchen towel, poses as a block of abused tofu, represents domestic violence. A woman touches the wounds and hopes to find her way out of the frightful memories.

Mixed media on canvas.

Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth character represents a conflict between femininity and masculinity, which also illustrates the role of a woman in modern society. The canvas poses as a piece of tofu, is a gentle form carrying qualities of subtlety and grace. I drew a male-female version of Lady Macbeth in blood, as a contrast, to question our appreciation of feminine beauty, both spiritually and as a human being.

Painted cloth, string, paint on canvas.

To be abused is to be betrayed; and to be betrayed is to forever be unsure of who can be trusted. The painting is of nerve cells in a human brain. I imagine how a painful memory affects the function of an abused child’s nervous system.

Mixed media on canvas.

This painting is my tribute to a spiritual leader. He jumps with courage into a gap within the tofu, to offer service to others with humility.

Mixed media on canvas.

Charity exhibition at PubArt Gallery

2013

Tofu to me, is home. Is it a habit, a taste I grow up with, or is it memory? I can’t really tell. There are a lot of exquisite tofu dishes out there, but all I remember is the homemade stuffed tofu by my maternal grandma, and how she delicately made it with her wrinkled hands. Each bite is made with care and hope, a simple hope of the elderly longing for her children and grandchildren be home round the dinner table with her. My grandma lives by her own. And though her sons and grandsons are nearby, there is a kind of unspoken loneliness that cannot be measured by mere distance. When asked if she’d love to move in with her daughter? She said, you girls are all married to another family. You may say she is stubborn, but aren’t I? I see my mother in her. I somehow see the future me in her. One said that our personality is in-borne, perhaps later life gives it a tweak. Her legs have been giving her pain all these years, that’s why she always wears a sadden face. But her life is never a day without love, with her she carries the 30 years of loving memories with my long passed grandpa.

People say that life is like a mix of tastes. Once in a while I have this longing for the most original and simple bite. My grandma loves falling in her nostalgia, I guess I’m most like her in this. I wish that I could smile with charm like her in the days when my face is filled with wrinkles.

說到豆腐，我只想到家。是習慣是口味還是回憶，我也分不清。外邊有各式各樣的精巧菜式，可我只想到婆婆弄的釀豆腐，記得她那雙滿佈皺紋的手輕輕的把一磗磗豆腐翻來覆去，每一口都盛載許多關懷與期望。期望，是兒孫圍在一起吃頓飯。婆婆她獨居，雖然兒孫都住在隔壁，可是有種寂寞，不是單說距離的。問她要不要搬來跟她親一點的女兒同住？她說：都是外嫁女。說她是執著，可我又何嘗不是？在她身上，我看到媽媽，也看到可能的那個自己。聽說很多性格是天生的，生活歷練再扭少許。她的雙腳給她很多苦，讓她常常皺著眉，嘴角也愛下垂。可她一生不缺愛，心裡滿滿的是早早遠去的外公與她一起三十載的人生。

有說人生五味雜陳。嚐盡珍百味，還偶會想尋回差點遺忘的清淡。婆婆愛回憶。這個我最像她。但願將來我臉上的皺紋跟她一樣美。

- Celine

Picture taken by Claire for project Tofu & Violence

At first I had thought all I wanted to do was to protect it, to maintain its shape. I would hold it, cradle it, try as much as possible to keep it together.
I was so gentle with the firm tofu, thinking of stillness, and maintaining,
my hands were a nest, watched over by sparrows.

When I held the silken tofu a different urge overtook me.
It was so yielding, its fragility was begging me to break it.
You can't go against an object's nature.
If it is firm, hold it steady, if it wants to break, let it break.
My hands were cupped around the tofu the same both times,
but the second time I held as hard as I could, tighter and tighter, until its waters flowed down my arms and onto the ground below.

-Viki

Picture taken by Claire for project Tofu & Violence

Unappreciated, often times taken for granted.

This is how a lot of people see tofu, and often times how I see myself.

Yet in tofu there is so much character, subtle flavour hidden, a faint but longed for taste, quality not easy to describe.

This is how I connect with tofu, and my setting being underwater is simply because as a swimmer I feel at one with it. Tranquility once under it, free from the madness of the surroundings.

Tofu as a fragile substance held underwater. Too many contradictions, I don't think anyone bothered to ever do this before.

- Louie

Picture taken by Claire for project Tofu & Violence

'When thinking about tofu, the keywords that immediately come to my mind, without any filtering, are ‘Asia’, ‘vegetarian’, ‘plain’. Tofu reminds me of this restaurant I once went to in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto. I associate tofu to simplicity and balance. I eat tofu every other day.

For the tofu project, I wanted to evoke something soothing and reassuring, such as massaging the hand of a young child or an elderly person. Infancy and old age have a lot in common. I decided to wear a ring that was my grand-grand-mother’s ring. It was passed down from mother to daughter for four generations. I wear it but it does not belong to me, I’ll pass it to my daughter when she is a young woman.'

-Amandine

Picture taken by Claire for project Tofu & Violence

I gave a brick of tofu to a group of participants of different backgrounds, asked them to use their bare hands or any body parts to hold it, feel it, and exist with it. Photographs were taken as the skin holding it. At the end of the session, they were asked to write about their relationship with tofu.

Project "Tofu and Violence" has tried to present tofu as a metaphor for gentleness and nonviolence against violence. A limited edition set of 3 books "Tofu & Violence" was made to document the project.

Set of 3 books. English. Softcover. 40 cm X 28 cm. English & Chinese. 300 limited numbered edition. Published in Hong Kong.

In stock. Please contact for details.

From book

TOFUESE MONOLOGUES – REFLECTIONS ON FRAGILITY AND GENTLENESS

Books selling event at Unar Coffee to fundraise for local charity group RainLily, who supports victim-survivors of sexual violence to recover from the trauma.

Books selling event at Unar Coffee to fundraise for local charity group RainLily, who supports victim-survivors of sexual violence to recover from the trauma.