makanai
makanai is an ongoing photographic installation composed of continuously accumulated images documenting meals, kitchens, workers, conversations, restaurants, and everyday acts of preparation encountered across different locations and periods of time.
The project originated decades ago while working as a busboy, observing the informal staff meals created from unused ingredients remaining at the end of the day — an improvisational cooking practice known in Japanese as “makanai.” Existing somewhere between staff meal, communal ritual, experimentation, and conversation, these gatherings formed a social and creative space operating quietly behind the public face of the restaurant.
Installed as a continuous horizontal band traversing architectural space, the work functions simultaneously as archive, social document, spatial drawing, and lived timeline.
Notes / Background
The project originated decades ago while working as a busboy, observing the informal staff meals created from unused ingredients remaining at the end of the day — improvised dishes assembled from remnants that would otherwise be discarded. In Japanese, this practice is known as makanai: a staff meal prepared behind the scenes within restaurants and communal working environments. Existing somewhere between nourishment, experimentation, conversation, and daily ritual, these gatherings functioned as a kind of informal social space — part break room, part critique session, part experimental kitchen.
For this series, each iteration focuses on a restaurant or eatery that has shaped the artist’s relationship to food, memory, and cultural experience. One significant chapter of the project centers around Beverly Soon Tofu in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, operated by Monica Lee, whose approach to cooking emphasized home-style preparation, health-conscious ingredients, and deeply rooted traditions of agricultural knowledge and care.
Accumulated over time and across locations, the photographic sequences function less as fixed documentary records than as lived archives of labor, hospitality, migration, routine, and shared daily experience. Through repetition and continuous expansion, the work traces how food, conversation, and environment quietly shape social memory and human connection.
makanai
2015–ongoing
photographic installation and lived document