Seeing faces in your food? You're not going crazy. For creative director and hobbyist food photographer David Leung, it's an art form. His latest exhibition, See Food Not See Food, takes the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia—perceiving familiar patterns where they don't actually exist—and turns it into a whimsical exploration of the faces hiding in our meals.
Leung has made a name for himself out of an uncanny knack for transforming the ordinary into the surreal through his symmetrical, almost kaleidoscopic images. His Beasts From Feasts series reimagines fancy teppanyaki platters and humble fried garlic alike as strange, beady-eyed creatures. But Leung's new show at Harbour City in Tsim Sha Tsui, which kicked off last week, isn't just a greatest hits parade of his pareidolia prowess.
Across five distinct collections and 22 new works, he's collaborated with local artists, chefs and food lovers to push his edible anthropomorphism into fresh, innovative realms. There are dreamy iPhone landscapes reframed to mimic the device's dimensions. Calligraphic musings from artist Benny Li accompanying Leung's "delicacy literature." Even an entire series devoted to extracting faces from the abstract swirls of handmade jams—an exercise in "art jamming" alongside jam artisan and former Tatler Dining editor Wilson Fok.
For the master of finding the hidden, Leung's new exhibition is a delectable showcase of his unique vision. We spoke to Leung to find out the accidental beginnings of his artistic ability, his favourite creature he's uncovered so far, and how he differs from your usual artist.
David Leung's See Food Not See Foodexhibition is due to run until June 16, 2024, from 11am to 10pm daily at Gallery by the Harbour, Shop 207, Level 2, Ocean Centre, Harbour City, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong.
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David Leung's See Food Not See Food exhibition is due to run until June 16, 2024 (Photo courtesy of Gallery by the Harbour)
Pareidolia is a constant theme in your artwork. What does your fixation on pareidolia say about your own psyche?
I didn't find this word until two years ago. I always take photographs when I go to eat with friends. Usually people just post them and then that's it; but I saved all the good photographs from before and during COVID, and I found out that I could actually see something inside these pictures.
I looked more into this phenomenon and found out about pareidolia, which basically means we humans have a tendency to look at things and try to find faces within everything. I found it quite interesting that I could find these faces in my food photographs, so I tried to combine the two of them together since I have so many of them. I came out with my first food photography collection back in 2022.
Since then, I have tried to embed or include this theme of pareidolia as my main concept, because after doing some research online, I didn't find anyone else approaching it in this way. Some people may use clouds, daily objects, elements of nature like trees or bark to look for faces, but seldom do people look at food as I'm doing now. That's how it all started two years ago.
Funnily enough, I realised that it may be related to my eye injury from three years ago. I've been taking pictures of food for over 10 years, but only since then, when my retina tore, did this happen.
For nine months I had to look at things with one eye, while the other eye had double vision, blurring and black spots. In my line of work, I can't afford to be blind. It's all healed now, but one day I thought, "Maybe this [pareidolia] has something to do with that incident." It all came to me, like what Steve Jobs used to say about connecting the dots: from what I did before as a creative person in the commercial industry, my love for food and photography, and then having that incident.
Do you think the symmetry aspect also came about from your eye injury?
Yes. It has something to do with how I see things now. It's kind of like a mirrored effect in my mind, though I can't really explain it physically or mentally. It has to be something wrong with my eye and brain together.
I'm fine looking at things normally in daily life, but it's when I try to look at things differently, which I always find interesting to look for patterns, even in my work and so on, I see something else—but not in a scary way.
When you first unveiled your pareidolia photography, what was the reaction from the foodie community?
Most of them found it interesting because as a foodie, you tend to see food in different contexts: the ingredients, taste, texture, presentation. But the way I present my food photographs is different. It's like another face or species that I've found, allowing people to look at it through another lens.
For example, some collectors of my previous work like to look at [their artwork depicting sweet and sour pork] as a dog because they really like sweet and sour pork and have never seen it look like that before. So it's quite satisfying when people look at my work for over 30 seconds, because no one would normally look at just a piece of food for that long. It inspires them to see everyday things differently.
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A piece from David Leung's 'Beasts From Feasts' collection (Photo courtesy of Gallery by the Harbour)
'Off Menu' by David Leung and Benny Lee (Photo courtesy of Gallery by the Harbour)
What's the most surprising or unexpected creature you've captured so far?
I have to say the puppies from last year that I shot at Sushi Mori Tomoaki. Mori-san commissioned two pieces from me, and after two tasting sessions, I found two faces within one piece of sushi—like twins from the same piece. That was the most special one, and a best-seller last year since Hong Kong people love sushi so much. It's very cute, like a bulldog.
For your exhibition this year, you invited the public to submit photographs. How did that influence your perspective on food photography?
As you can see, there are like five collaborations this time. It was really an opportunity for me to explore the possibility of collaborations, before which there were none at all. This collaboration called Camera Eats First was the result of brainstorming between myself and Harbour City. When they invited me to host an exhibition, I wanted to utilise the foot traffic. They ended up launching a campaign inviting foodies to take food photographs shot inside Harbour City.
From there, I got to be the judge for this photo competition and to see if I could find any faces in those submissions. Out of the 180 submissions, I could only find one face in a Shake Shack hamburger, which was interesting enough to make it into my art as the symmetrical Double Shack piece. You also have another collection here called Off Menu where you collaborated with Benny Lee to incorporate calligraphy.
Benny and I have been friends for over a decade, and I've always loved his work with Chinese calligraphy, in which he constantly incorporates food subjects and content. Usually, he talks about the food—not only how to cook it but the history and how he sees it as a food writer for so many years—so it occurred to me to invite him for this four-hands collaboration with my photographs.
I explained to him why I chose this youtiao [fried crullers] as it looks like my dog, and then he used calligraphy to write directly on top of the photograph with his content and calligraphic style. It's not usually my type of work—it's like a special one-off piece.
You also collaborated with Wilson Fok to combine jam with photography. What inspired you to do that?
Wilson is like an artisan to me, except he uses jam as his medium. I found it interesting to use the word "art jamming" literally, so I invited him to create this collaboration with me.
To kick things off, he gave me a lot of jars of jam; then I had to ask him what kind of bread do to put on top, and how he usually eats jam. It was much more difficult to shoot—there's nothing really styled in a way. For this collection, I shot the most pictures compared to the others, and I could only find four pieces I was satisfied with from the jam.
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'Art Jamming', created in collaboration with Wilson Fok (Photo courtesy of Gallery by the Harbour)
What's the story behind the Shot on iPhone collection?
About six months ago, out of nowhere, the PR director from Apple contacted me through Instagram. He said what I'm doing is quite interesting and wanted to see if I could find faces using the iPhone camera, which I haven't used much for shooting my artwork before. So he gave me an iPhone and told me, "Just use it and have fun with it and see if anything comes up." I told him it may not be possible but I would try anyway.
Throughout these few months, I tried shooting food with it but it didn't really work because my style is quite macro. Even though the iPhone has those functions, it doesn't have the same quality as my usual camera shots. So I tried doing something else by shooting lifestyle moments—like sitting by a fireplace talking to friends, or having a walk in a Tokyo park, or outside a restaurant in Hong Kong after a tasting. It's these daily moments where I could really make use of the iPhone's enhanced quality like the RAW shooting format and camera mobility.
How else does this exhibition differ from your previous work?
I also explored the production side of my creative art pieces. In the past, these pictures were just framed normally: square, rectangle, etc. But this time, I incorporated the framing production as a concept specific to each collection's nature. For example, I mounted the original round canvases for Beasts From Feasts on ceramic plates. For the iPhone pieces, I made the frames to be the exact dimensions of an iPhone but bigger, with rounded corners to look like an iPhone case. And for Wilson's jam collaboration, I used a black metal frame with transparent glass in between the picture wrap and a white paper backing, like a jam jar.
Because I have a full-time job, this is like a passion project for my creative expression, compared to commercial work where there are so many restrictions and hierarchy. But with this hobby of mine, I can just do whatever I want. There's no particular KPI I have to chase in terms of sales or exposure or whatever.
Galleries usually ask if I can provide pictures of the process of my art creation, like studio pictures with paintings, brushes and all that. But I told them I can only give them pictures of me eating, or maybe shots I take while eating, which is very different from normal painters confined to a studio. I have the chance to go out, eat, take pictures, and it's only my mind that makes the difference when I try to come up with these faces—turning them into a new kind of species that I can introduce to everyone.
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