Slurp!
The bursts of color wending down Maynard Alley in the Chinatown–International District are a study in peacefully coexisting contradictions. Slurp!, a whimsical and dynamic rendering of the immigrant experience by Akira Ohiso, celebrates the complex entanglements that form identity; the pieces of the mural inform one another, and yet each vibrant cluster of noodles is separated from the other. At a single glance, their similarities are most apparent, and yet with each moment of continued examination, their differences rise to the forefront, each detail serving to distinguish one noodle cluster from another. In his artist’s statement, Ohiso writes that the clusters allude to different geographic locations, and their meandering route gestures to the nonlinear, “circuitous” path often walked by immigrants.