2015–present · Photographic installation
makanai is an ongoing photographic installation built from continuously accumulated images of meals, kitchens, workers, conversations, restaurants, and everyday acts of preparation, gathered across places and years.
The project traces back decades to the artist’s time as a busboy, watching the informal staff meals cooked at the end of the day from leftover ingredients. In Japanese this improvised practice is called makanai. Part staff meal, part communal ritual, part experiment and conversation, these gatherings formed a quiet social and creative space behind the public face of the restaurant.
Installed as a continuous horizontal band running through architectural space, the work is at once archive, social document, spatial drawing, and lived timeline.
Notes / Background
Each iteration centers on a restaurant or eatery that has shaped the artist’s relationship to food, memory, and culture. One significant chapter follows Beverly Soon Tofu in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, run by Monica Lee, whose cooking drew on home-style preparation, health-conscious ingredients, and deep traditions of agricultural knowledge and care.
Gathered over time and across locations, the photographic sequences form a lived archive of labor, hospitality, migration, routine, and shared daily experience. Through repetition and continuous expansion, the work traces how food, conversation, and environment shape social memory and human connection.
makanai
2015–present
Photographic installation and lived document