Michelle Lee
Can You Still Use a Broken Bowl?
When I started working on my collage, I knew the story I wanted to tell but I did not know how to tell it until now. Last night, I received a phone call from my uncle in China, telling me that his wife just gave birth to a baby boy and they are coming over to New York next month for a family dinner. Then, I knew how I wanted to tell my story.
This collage is a bowl of rice, representing the dinners my family used to have every year; those were the only times when everyone got together. The pieces of brown fabric make up the bottom of the bowl, symbolizing my great-grandparents and grandparents and the life they lived, farming on the land in the countryside of China. The pieces of multicolored fabric make up the rest of the bowl, symbolizing my parents, aunts, and uncles and the changes their generation went through from working on the fields in China to immigrating to the United States to sewing in textile factories to going to college to starting their own companies. The pieces of cut-out jeans make up the rice inside the bowl, symbolizing my cousins, my siblings, and me and how we are now going out on our own to find our careers.
Notice that the pieces of fabrics are not placed together but separated. This is a broken bowl; the cracks represent the problems that my family has been going through over the last few years – the deaths, the divorces and remarriages, and the disputes over money. We are drifting apart; I don’t even remember the last time we had a family dinner. I am afraid that someday, the bowl will shatter and it will not be able to be repaired. However, in the mist of all this chaos, there is a white piece symbolizing hope and representing my baby cousin who was just born. He might be able to fix this broken bowl and put the family back together again.
December 12th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
I think that is interesting how you decided to represent your family’s relationship with a cracked rice bowl. At first glance, I did not notice the gaps in between some of the fabrics; at first glance, the problems in your family were not obvious. I think that the chopsticks were a nice addition. They lightened the heavy theme of the collage.
December 15th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
When I first saw this collage I really didn’t understand what I was supposed to derive from the image of a rice bowl, but after looking at it as a kind of abstract art I saw that each piece fit in one specific place, just like members of a family and just like elements of history. The lucky money pockets add a sense of traditional Asian culture which is like a backstory to your family. My favorite part is the rice in the bowl as the new baby is the hope of a family.
December 17th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
WOW, very creative. The actual idea of a bowl of rice symbolizing your life is very original. I like your use of color and of various fabrics to represent different aspects of your life. Also, the white of cloth in the center is a very nice touch–representing your newborn cousin. The red background highlights your ancestry and the two chop sticks “next to the bowl of rice” make your collage that much more creative.