Modern art creation cannot be separated from various kinds of problems of current concern. Cheng Yuyang's series of images: Food Variation is the reflection on the food safety issue that has currently aroused the concern from the public. Fruits, vegetables, eggs, and meat are foods that are part of our daily diet, but instead they have led to a series of social problems.

Instead of the most direct realistic recording method, Food Variation reveals the dialectical relationship between the ideal and the reality, the beautiful and the ugly described by the artist. Shooting by the self-made super-large picture camera, directly exposing the color silver halide photographic paper, and presenting the image as color negative, he acquired this series of work with strong color impact. The food in the artist's photos disturbs our knowledge of the original color and texture of food, making it look complicated and unrecognizable. Cheng Yuyang's image attempts to throw out a question: is it enough to have the outlines for identifying the truth of things if we leave out their intrinsic quality? The pictures are colorful, yet they are disturbing indeed. Our mind turns worried and uneasy when it cannot restore them as they are in our memory. Maybe the most revealing part is the injectors in the middle of the pictures that are warning people against the reality behind the surface.

Image: © Cheng Yuyang, 798 Photo Gallery