Multidisciplinary Artist
Minh H Phan
Artist’s Statement
In honor of Food Forward’s 15th Anniversary, I want to honor the Food Forward team, its community, and especially, founder Rick Nahmias. Rick was an artist photographing migrant workers and through this lens, Rick often saw disparity in the food system. Food Forward was Rick’s way of activating community through abundance; connecting how he saw the world and his community to address the inequity in systems. This work ultimately emerged a new system that embraced thoughtfulness, humanity and even ephemerality (my awe moment!). Rick and I have been friends and community allies for a long time. We would often talk about the balance of individual expression; art; philosophy; the need to make systematic, communal impact;and the need to collapse those spaces when possible.
At a time when farms and restaurants are unsustainable on various levels, and food seems to only exist in transactional form, my dedication to the food world stopped making sense for me. Albeit thankful for accolades including two back-to-back Michelin stars (2021, 2022), continuing to push in that direction seemed hollow, precarious, damaging. What started out as a creative practice to honor community and nature, hone craft, and push boundaries has also put decades of toll over my hands and my body, and leaves me questioning my duty to serve. Curiosity continued to be the center of my practice, but the urgent fatigue along with the weight of a creaking, unsustainable system (the restaurant industry) kept grinding and distracting me. Burnt out and skeptical, the only quiet I could think of was to implode both projects as the public knew them, PHENAKITE and porridge + puffs.
I call them projects and not restaurants because I realized I never intended to open restaurants. From my background as a filmmaker and creative, my culinary career started post-9/11 as an antidote to what seemed intangible, with the fate of my creative work left up to others. Food was (and is) an intimate medium where I was able to hone and used to connect with others and create literal gifts, my best motivation to date. In retrospect, the medium made sense to many immigrant artists of my generation as it connected our practice to our family. The medium itself was also accessible—materials found in our mom’s garden, on hikes, at farmers markets, at the grocery store, in our own refrigerators and pantry, and even in dumpsters (long live the dumpster dive era).
I have spent the last months recentering my practice to make room for personal work. My goal is to emerge new ideas, broaden community, and kindly interrogate my work and process, including its shortcomings as well as its potential to connect. At the same time, I want to soften invisible boundaries and get my heart, gut, mind, and hands to make aligned decisions that are expansive and not reactive, in service of joy, not fear.
Part of my joy comes from my work with community partners which led me to spend an afternoon with Rick Nahmias at Food Forward’s Produce Pit Stop, the warehouse and soul of Food Forward’s operational work. My head was swirling walking through the warehouse—so much material, physically and metaphorically. I was inspired by the organization and the amount of “food waste aka food abundance,” thoughtfulness at every single corner, the people, the smell, the vastness. I teased and asked if I could spend more time there and have Food Forward and the Pit Stop be my muse. I don’t remember what happened next, but within the hour, Rick and Amir Zambrano, Food Forward’s Managing Director of Programs, had identified a space for my studio and we immediately started making this all happen.
What is surprising me most is the work in this artist residency, which I thought would be along the lines of testing and experimenting with all the found culinary materials to push the boundaries of food waste into paper, textiles and other useful things. But as my work has come into focus, I now realize the new body of work is about humanity, ancestral knowledge, trauma, my very own story of being a refugee, and my relationship with food and systems. Being at the Pit Stop has gotten me at my core, I have cried in the enormous walk-in coolers, thinking about this space and what it may have meant to previous generations, including my parents, to other refugees and immigrants, to career bomb builders (it’s a former bomb building factory known as the Cheli Air Force base). Reconciling food and war for me as a child of war is on my mind a lot these days, thinking about the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon (Black April), 50 years ago come 2025.
The space has also allowed me to have a more holistic approach to my work and to be more ambitious with scale and material. The freedom to not have to define my work has allowed me to lean into a transcultural and transdisciplinary practice which I hope will help expand the proverbial table for those like myself who are constrained by binaries, always searching for a sense of belonging.
As with past projects, my starting place is always a conceptual narrative. The expression that follows is an exercise in connecting the world I imagine with rigorous exploration of ideas, and creating thoughtful access points to invite others in. Allowing myself to go beyond restaurant spaces has allowed me to incorporate dialogues as well as sculptural forms and language into my ephemeral performances and culinary practices, not only to build new worlds, but also to transform our current one.
I realize the shift can be abstract and messy. Yet, I think this artist residency is a start to encompassing and holding the past while looking towards the future, inspiring regenerative and thoughtful practices for humanity. I hope in this experience I am able to continue building work that is intimate but impactful, expansive but personal, and as always, center humanity and curiosity. Amongst my challenges is overcoming invisible walls and seeking support and understanding from others even if this work in progress lacks institutional form and transactional function. However, I am hopeful that the stable ground of Food Forward’s Pit Stop is where there is community and collaboration with aligned partners. This is where there is an immense amount of excitement for Food Forward and myself. This is where the vision goes from concept to a physical form, a tangible, communal gift.