monicaCREATIVE NOTES / Art & making
A passport made of food pictures: inside Monica’s sticker booklet
The cover is orange, but the main characters inside are pictures of food. Food Passport by Zhan Yining, known as Monica, collects stickers in a preprinted booklet. Six photographs document the cover and selected spreads. Turning through them shifts attention from page themes to the different ways images are placed inside a shared visual frame.
The cover holds the collection together
Black rings, star-like decorations and the large word PASSPORT organise the cover. It gives separate stickers a sense of belonging to one collection, even before the booklet is opened. The cover and interior have different roles. One announces a whole collection, while the spreads provide smaller settings in which particular pictures can be arranged and compared.
One frame, many scales of image
Many pages use a border resembling the perforated edge of a stamp. Inside, a large sticker may stand almost alone, or several smaller images may share the space. In the Vietnam-and-Arctic spread, the squid on one side and the shrimp pictures on the other create different outlines. Elsewhere, groups of foods occupy a larger part of the page. Repeated borders keep the booklet visually connected, while changes in image size and number make individual spreads worth looking at separately.
A spread can compare variations
The Norwegian salmon spread offers a particularly clear comparison. Smaller pictures on one side show different combinations, while larger sashimi stickers on the other emphasise the orange colour and striped appearance. Similar subject matter is presented at several scales. Other printed themes include Thailand, Canada, Japan, Argentina and Iceland. These printed themes organise the collection and offer another route for finding connections between its pages.
A collection rewards a second look
A second look can begin with a small question: which spreads are mostly orange, which have fewer stickers, and where are pictures grouped closely? Finding those relationships reveals collecting as an activity of sorting and arranging. Monica used existing printed pages and images; the recorded craft lies in bringing those materials together. The six views preserve more than a favourite sticker. They let a visitor move between cover, spread and individual detail, noticing how the parts support the experience of browsing a little book. The visible centre folds also remind us that the pictures belong to a booklet whose pages can actually be turned.
Two more questions
Do the six photographs show six works?
No. They document the cover and spreads of a single Food Passport work.
How can a theme guide a second look?
Choose a colour or ingredient, then compare its position and size across different pages to discover variations within the shared frame.
Explore the works in this note
Profile information was supplied by her family. These notes were prepared by the Monica portfolio editorial team from the original works, performance records and playable projects on this site, with AI-assisted writing and translation. Descriptions of existing work are distinguished from activities readers may try. The articles are editorial introductions, not first-person accounts written by Monica.
Profile and editorial notes →