Noodle Art: Phagomania

Behind one of this year’s hottest food trends – noodles – lurks a plethora of artistic inspiration. Who knew?

Feature by Lewis MacDonald | 21 Jun 2016

When this Phagomaniac was a boy, there was only one kind of noodles – we just called them 'noodles'. These days, noodle fans are presented with an entanglement of different spindly options: udon, vermicelli, sen lek, soba, ho fun and the reigning king, ramen. One of 2016’s hot food trends is the Asian noodle soup, and there is a good chance that you've recently slurped over a hot ramen soup, Vietnamese beef pho or spicy Malaysian laksa.

Of course, Phagomania had its finger firmly on the ramen noodle pulse back in 2013, when we reported on the mighty ramen burger – the burger with a ramen noodle bun. Since being conceived by a single guy in one single shop, the creation has gone global with its imitators including US chain Red Robin. Just think of us as weird food talent agents.

And with the rise in popularity of ramen and his soupy noodle brethren, noodles are making a comeback in the form of both food and art. Early experimenters in noodle art created celebrity portraits with the likes of Amy Winehouse and Russell Brand, with a Super Noodle-based portrait of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant among the highlights.

Things then got serious when posh instant noodle makers Kabuto campaigned for #noodledoodle artworks of more celebrity portraits including ‘Ramen Gosling’, ‘Miley Soyrus’ and ‘Harry Styles of Wok Direction’. Somebody was really using their noodle on that one. Using their... Oh, never mind.

Ramen's resurgence has taken noodle art to a dark, weird place when a Instagram account popped up named ‘celebrities_in_ramen’. It delivered as promised, with a relentless brigade of perplexing and surreal images of various celebrities recontextualised in bowls of noodle soup. Its creator, Josh Jones, admits “there’s really no reason why I’m doing this to be honest.” Nihilistic noodling, we'll call it; we're still trying to work out what the celebrity/noodle connection is in the first place.

Turning to fine art, it will be unsurprising to hear that many an artist has tried their hand with noodles as their medium. The most triumphant use of noodle in art is French artist Theo Mercier's piece The Loner. A monolithic character, nearly 10 feet tall, sits oozing on a regular-sized chair with a sorrowful gaze of a person who lives a life of only eating the number of instant packet-noodles necessary to construct such a monster. Who knew ramen noodles could have such a powerfully visual effect, or that they could so successfully communicate such bleakness?

So it’s off we go, to huddle over a warm bowel of noodle soup and contemplate the core meaning of our existence. As it turns out, said existence is entirely constructed from masses of one dimensional noodles in quantum soup, if we are to believe string theory. No wonder noodles keep turning up everywhere.