FROM FEBRUARY/MARCH 2023 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

“I'm an emotional eater,” says the interdisciplinary artist Kotama Bouabane. “If I’m feeling terrible, I will get something quick and convenient.” Born in Laos, Bouabane was a baby when his family emigrated to Canada in 1980 among the wave of refugees displaced by the Vietnam War. As a child growing up in North York, he rejected his parents’ delicious Laotian soups and stews, instead pining for McDonald’s. “I had a weird relationship with food; my parents had to drop off fast food for me at lunch,” he recalls.

Now, at 43, he’s mindful of his health and his need for recreation; he plays tennis several times a week and has taken adult swimming lessons. But those old cravings still tug at him, a tension he explores in the playful images on this page. Shot in a flat, deadpan style with a simple tripod-mounted DSLR set-up, these images reflect the fraught relationship between fast food, emotional comfort, health and sport, all subjects that weighed on Bouabane’s mind during the pandemic. They are also a love letter to his favourite Asian immigrant-run fast-food joints in his neighbourhood, which straddles Parkdale and Roncesvalles.

In one, a slice of Cici’s pepperoni pizza gets sized up by a pair of swimming goggles with a wide-open mouth and googly eyes of pepperoni and sliced black olives. In another, a fried chicken drumstick from Ding-a-Wing is accessorized to look like a dumbbell.

He pays tribute to another favourite, Lao Thai, with a portrait of its proprietor, Lits Kong, made from grains of sticky rice. In the one outlier to the essay’s theme, he photographed an egg roll duct taped to the wall, a reference to a notorious conceptual art piece by artist Maurizio Cattelan, which depicts a banana taped to a wall. “It’s silly and talks about how absurd the art world can be at times,” he explains. “It conflates high and low,” while injecting his own ethnic identity into an art-world conversation.

Happily, Bouabane has come around to appreciating his mother’s Laotian cooking. He returns to visit his childhood home often and enjoys the dishes she cooks, often soups like khao piak sen, khao poon, or the Sunday staple of pho, along with spicy papaya salad or spring rolls. Many of her ingredients come from the family’s passionately tended garden: cilantro, mint, shiso, hot peppers, cucumbers, long beans, eggplant or bitter melon grown with Bouabane’s father’s homemade fertilizer.

As much as he has embraced his heritage, however, part of him remains a product of Canada and its bland comfort foods. “It’s still, like every time, too spicy for me,” he says.