"Various Shades of Off-White" is a 5 minute contemporary movement film featuring assorted Asian tableware objects and food items, traditional clothing pieces, a circular dinner table, a lazy susan, projections, and eight female, Asian bodies.
It is a celebration, acknowledgement, and sharing of our collective and individual identities, cultures, and experiences. We are all the same but different, and perceived as both depending on when it suits others best; minority or monolith? How do we connect to a culture that is inherently ours but completely foreign to us? How do we maintain a connection with culture that is marginalised? We use symbols, locations, objects, language, style, music, anything we can to root ourselves in something that we are constantly grasping for but never able to hold on to. Sometimes those same things are used against us by others, so how do we find ownership? Food brings us all together and surpasses the need for all those things, and it gives us the ability to connect with the people around us. The act of sharing a meal is the love of imparting love, and that is what builds and strengthens our diasporic communities and cultures.