Sprouts of Resilience: A Journey from Seed to Tofu
Location: Mobile throughout Chinatown
Dates: Spring 2025
Photo Credit: Zack Carrol
Amidst the challenges of the current economic crisis, climate change, food inequity, and limited access to green spaces and housing in Boston's Chinatown, artist Ying Ye’s public community engagement art project, Sprouts of Resilience: A Journey from Seed to Tofu, brings Chinese traditional aesthetics of gardening, street food tricycles, and collective food-making gatherings to activate Chinatown’s public spaces and foster cultural resilience and belonging. The project seeks to explore and offer alternative pathways to physical and mental well-being for local residents.
This performative, interactive, and community-engaged art project features a portable tricycle sculpture that grows soybean sprouts and invites community members to take sprouts from the sculpture home or into public spaces to nurture. In a communal gathering, participants will collectively transform soybeans into tofu through their labor symbolizing acts of cultural healing.
Sprouts of Resilience: A Journey from Seed to Tofu is part of the Un-monument Initiative presented by Pao Arts Center, curated by Lani Asunción and in collaboration with City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture. It is brought to you by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
About the artist:
Ying Ye 叶荧
(she/her)
Ying Ye (叶荧) is a bilingual, Fuzhou-born interdisciplinary Chinese immigrant artist who weaves her family’s traditions of cooking and farming into her art. She cultivates food, labor, and body into socially engaged art, performance, installation, and public art to examine cultural identity, intergenerational trauma, and Asian or Asian American experience. Her work addresses the theme of urban development and racial and economic justice in art and labor, challenging systemic oppression and disrupting social structures. Besides her art pursuit, Ye also works in between education, languages, design, and culinary arts to promote cultural healing, social equity, and community inclusion.
