Hotpot & Tea

Holly Zhou

I started linocutting because I’m impatient. The few times I’ve tried to paint with acrylics or watercolor, I would sit in front of the empty canvas or paper for hours, attempting to mix the precise shades only to color over them when I realized my proportions were off. My desires outrun my capabilities, leaving me with half-finished canvases that I never want to revisit.

Linocutting is a type of printmaking where you cut a mirrored design into a linoleum block, apply ink, and then imprint it onto paper. I thought it’d be faster because my imagination would be limited by the cheap chisel and pseudo-linoleum set (I say pseudo because it feels too soft to be real linoleum…) I borrowed from my university’s library, but it turns out that I’m capable of making any task unnecessarily difficult for myself. These days, with so many of the people I care about under immense anxiety about whether they will be able to receive gender-affirming care or whether they can remain in this country, I’ve been trying to create more pieces rooted in collective joy. I find joy difficult to access unless it’s collective, or rather, unless I can borrow it from other people and other times. I asked some friends and sourced my own camera roll for photos of hotpot and tea, both communal forms of eating and drinking.

I took bits and pieces from the photographs to create these linocuts:

With the glorious and temporary freedom of my summer break, I spent a few full days in the library, carving the linoblocks, printing, and cutting. Most of the time, I was the only person in the workspace. There was a meditative rhythm to it—the squelching paint, my fists pressing the block to the paper, the guillotine cutter creaking up and down.

I love making things, I hate having possessions, and I love giving things away, so linocutting happens to be an art form that satisfies this intersection of my wants. I made these with the intention of gifting them to you (my dear Soupbone friends). Drop me a line if you’d like one, and I will very happily mail you a print! Or perhaps I can send a bunch to Phoebe and y’all can receive it with the next Alphabet Soup installment <3