A Guide to Fry an Egg
A Guide to Fry an Egg, install prints 150*200mm, at London College of Communication, 2023.
To be completely honest with myself, I’ve always been an egg person — I really enjoyed their taste and appearance. One particular memory stands out nearly two years ago: the time my mom fried a perfect sunny side-up and placed it on top of my bowl of rice. As I savored every bite, a profound sense of happiness and contentment washed over me.However, it was precisely this unremarkable, everyday moment that sparked an intense obsession within me — a longing for a nostalgic, dreamlike connection to fried eggs. This fascination led me start to craft my own ‘fried eggs’ with daily essentials, and the process becomes very therapeutic which relieves my stress and anxiety.
Photography serves as a medium for recording and tracing marks of life, and these ‘fried eggs’ composed of everyday objects are the marks I’ve collected from my living environment. Each of them is present equally as a ‘photograph’ that reveals an intimate perspective of mine. Unlike traditional photographs confined to rectangular pieces of paper or digital screens, the photographs I create manifest as three-dimensional, absurd sculptures. They act as metaphors for my daily encounters; an examination of multi-culture, associations, and lifestyle. It is like an illumination of the facts that I have obtained by deconstructing real-life experiences and folding them into a piece sunny-side-up. The process becomes very therapeutic which relieves my intense obsession within me — a longing for a nostalgic, dreamlike connection to fried eggs.
As a complement to this project, I wrote a dissertation named ‘A Guide to Fry an Egg: The Egg Theory on Photography’ ( <- Click) that investigates how the creation, dissemination, and ingestion of images in contemporary society can be seen similarly to how we consume eggs.
©2024 Manyi Chan