Photography and Pop-up Books
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Slow Motion/Noodle Mountain

With the turn of a crank, delicious noodles explode from Colette Fu’s colossal pop-up book, Noodle Mountain. Auspicious clouds of noodles and over-life-size chopsticks float over the heads of viewers, while bean bags resembling soy sauce packets invite visitors to sit, rest, and ponder this whimsical monument. Inspired by the album cover of the children’s song On Top of Spaghetti, Noodle Mountain contemplates the deeply personal memories as well as the complex intergenerational histories of place, labor, and diaspora that food can conjure.

For the artist, who grew up in North Brunswick, NJ, childhood memories surface across the monument: a rollercoaster, interwoven with the swirls of noodles, recalls summers at the Jersey Shore; the table gestures to her childhood family kitchen, where her father would make fresh noodles with a pasta machine. Scenes of nostalgia converge with broader racialized experiences of Asians in America. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans opposed Chinese immigration, fearing the “Yellow Peril” that threatened to bring disease and crime to their shores. Such widespread rhetoric led to the destruction of Chinese businesses and homes, lynchings, and racist laws that severely curbed immigration from China to the U.S. Noodle Mountain recalls these histories: plumes of fire and traces of blood can be found in the noodles, while the table’s crank references the “Iron Chink”—an automatic salmon processor whose name was derived from a racist slur—which promised to replace Chinese labor. Despite these exclusionary practices, a legal loophole made exceptions for merchant visas that permitted business owners to move freely in and out of the country, leading to an exponential growth in Chinese restaurants, which are now integral to American culture.

Noodle Mountain invites visitors to consider the ways that food histories entangle with personal memories, which pass down through time and across the globe through recipes as they are re-adapted into new contexts.

Project manager: Gina Ciralli 
Slow Motion curated by Patricia Eunji Kim for Monument Lab
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Slow Motion/Noodle Mountain

With the turn of a crank, delicious noodles explode from Colette Fu’s colossal pop-up book, Noodle Mountain. Auspicious clouds of noodles and over-life-size chopsticks float over the heads of viewers, while bean bags resembling soy sauce packets invite visitors to sit, rest, and ponder this whimsical monument. Inspired by the album cover of the children’s song On Top of Spaghetti, Noodle Mountain contemplates the deeply personal memories as well as the complex intergenerational histories of place, labor, and diaspora that food can conjure.

For the artist, who grew up in North Brunswick, NJ, childhood memories surface across the monument: a rollercoaster, interwoven with the swirls of noodles, recalls summers at the Jersey Shore; the table gestures to her childhood family kitchen, where her father would make fresh noodles with a pasta machine. Scenes of nostalgia converge with broader racialized experiences of Asians in America. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans opposed Chinese immigration, fearing the “Yellow Peril” that threatened to bring disease and crime to their shores. Such widespread rhetoric led to the destruction of Chinese businesses and homes, lynchings, and racist laws that severely curbed immigration from China to the U.S. Noodle Mountain recalls these histories: plumes of fire and traces of blood can be found in the noodles, while the table’s crank references the “Iron Chink”—an automatic salmon processor whose name was derived from a racist slur—which promised to replace Chinese labor. Despite these exclusionary practices, a legal loophole made exceptions for merchant visas that permitted business owners to move freely in and out of the country, leading to an exponential growth in Chinese restaurants, which are now integral to American culture.

Noodle Mountain invites visitors to consider the ways that food histories entangle with personal memories, which pass down through time and across the globe through recipes as they are re-adapted into new contexts.

Project manager: Gina Ciralli 
Slow Motion curated by Patricia Eunji Kim for Monument Lab
Slow Motion/Noodle Mountain