#HTE

Reader Submitted: Niu Niu Tableware Aims to Express Hong Kong’s Community Eating Culture

Food is a language that expresses culture.

It symbolizes how we define ourselves in terms of religion, ethnicity, social class and so on. it offers insights into place history, community and memories. This project takes the conjunction of food and objects from earlier design experience and further builds upon for it. In particular, I focused on the cultural heritage of Hong Kong and the rich cuisine it has. It uses a local perspective to respond to the aesthetic and sensibility of Hong Kong and, in a way, create a new imaginative form of connection with others in the world.

Therefore, this Niu Niu project explores the relationship in society, lifestyle and history through Hong Kong food culture and further investigates the eating habits, food serving and food choice to reveal the characteristic of this city. Furthermore, it concentrates on Hong Kong traditional food, Yum Cha, in which dumplings act as the provocation to explore the idea of food, material and experience. The dumpling acts as the portal through which questions of making, material, performance and experience are explored.

Hence, the objective of this project is to utilize the quintessence of Hong Kong cuisine as design narrative, integrate into object design as a way to authentically design for Hong Kong food culture.