Old Lady Eating Mango with Americano

This work emerges from an absurd moment in a Starbucks, where an elderly woman in traditional Chinese dress ordered an iced Americano and proceeded to eat a ripe mango so that the juice splashed everywhere.. The scene, unintentionally theatrical, sliced through the carefully curated atmosphere of corporate calm and exposed the strange choreography of contemporary café culture. Her act was not rebellion, yet it read as a spontaneous critique of the sanitized, predictable behavior we perform in public spaces shaped by capitalism and algorithmic taste.

​

In translating this moment into an artwork, I became interested in how humor reveals the instability of the systems we take for granted. The woman’s unapologetic pleasure turned the café into a stage where cultural identity, class expectations, and global consumer rituals collided in ways that felt both surreal and completely ordinary. Her gesture functioned like a glitch in the algorithm, an interruption in the endlessly optimized rhythms of contemporary life. It made visible the absurdity we often overlook because we are too busy participating in it.