Junyan Chen (Naci)

I was inspired by a news story about some people releasing fish tofu by a river, the reason was that the local government didn’t allow life releasing activities, so they released fish tofu because they thought it was equal to fish. I researched the background of life releasing, one kind of life releasing is normal after rescuing, the other comes from Buddhism, the nine rounds of reincarnation, this life is to accumulate virtues and will be rewarded in the next life.

So in the southern part of China there are a lot of people doing life release activities, but now most of the life release has gone against the original intention, people just do it to get the reward, they don’t care whether the living environment is affected or not, the environmental impact, etc.

But I found that paper is not an environmentally friendly way to do this, so I planned to research biodegradable biological materials next, so that this material can be fed to the fish from the Birds, the Turtle, Frog and Fish. I used these four creatures to make four books about my process of feeding with biodegradable materials, and hopefully the books will be interactive for the reader to experience.

Because of the ocean pollution due to nuclear waste water in Japan, many toxic elements affect the marine life and cause mutations, and humans are affected in the process of consuming them. I used some strange poses to draw fish, because genetic mutations are not logical.

I also used Gyotaku’s way of making prints of fish and printing them on multiple fabrics and cutting them up, randomising them, then sewing them together to become new prints, combining them with my previous sketch to develop the prints further.

I used biomaterials to help me create the mutant fish food, using materials such as glycine to mimic the look of the fish and to find the stability of the materials. I researched what traditional Chinese fish food looks like and created a 3D model of it, making silicone moulds and removing the moulds from the biomaterials.

The next step is to research deeply into the design of future food and molecular gastronomy, and my finished product will be a bizarre mutant fish feast!