For Cynthia Delaney Suwito, instant noodles aren’t just a delicious comfort food that can be quickly prepared and consumed. Instant noodles are also her preferred medium for her art.
The Singapore-based artist’s latest masterpiece is an ongoing performance art piece. About once every two days, Suwito visits the gallery that houses her work, as a part of a special exhibition for young emerging artists. There, she cooks a couple of packets of instant noodles, making the dehydrated noodles pliable through the cooking process, and uses them to add more rows to her instant noodle tapestry. The edible work of art will be very big by the time the exhibition — and Suwito’s work — ends.
Suwito says that knitting with noodles acts as a commentary on today’s society. These instant noodles are meant to be consumed by people on the go. For many of them, all it takes is a microwave — or a pot of boiling water — to have a quick meal in minutes. However, once Suwito incorporates a fast meal into a slow artistic practice, knitting, she changes the meaning of the convenient noodles into something more thoughtful and lasting. She said that everyone in today’s society should try to slow down for a little while and work against the fast pace that has everyone rushing around all the time, on the go at every waking minute. The noodles tapestry itself is intricate and fragile looking. Suwito says that, in general, knitting is highly relaxing until she realizes one of her noodles is about to break and affect the row she’s working on. She uses all kinds of different instant noodles for her project, though she names one or two brands and types that yield the thickest, most structurally sound noodles for her knitting needles.
This isn’t the first time Suwito has used instant noodles to express her art. Another installation features packets of the comfort food accompanied by stories she solicited about participants’ memories and experiences with instant noodles. Still another project saw Suwito pretending to be an archaeologist and uncovering noodles as fossils, encased in rock or amber. Each piece glows with a special sort of luminescence, as if they are museum-quality pieces behind glass for people to marvel and wonder about.
Art can be whatever you see in your everyday life. From cooking to crafting, even the simple things we do to keep ourselves and our loved ones up and going can be transformed into art just by looking at it differently. Explore art in the world around you by enrolling in an art class via SGArtClass.com. SGArtClass.com helps connect you with an expert art teacher eager to help you discover art genres and projects that will lead you on an artistic journey. Take classes in everything from found art to contemporary art, embracing the extraordinary in the ordinary. You might never look at normal things in your life the same way again after taking an art class.
To learn more about Suwito’s unique and delicious artwork, go to http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/lifestyle/call-it-noodlework-she-knits-instant-noodles-to-make-art/3367018.html.