I chatted with Everest to discuss how her family’s food history shaped her relationships with different cuisines, why she feels her art is community-driven, and what new food adventures (and illustrations) await.

She imagines which dim sum dish would pair perfectly with which Chinese Zodiac, and assigns her interpretations of cartoon-y Asian beverages to different astrological signs (if you’re a Sagittarius like me, you’ll be delighted to know that we are peach Calpicos ). She takes traditional Asian soups and compresses them into illustrated cubes of noodles, tofu, and green onions. Her art is a harmonious marriage of color and texture, with themes of her mixed-race identity and intrigue with astrology sprinkled throughout.

Everest Strayer-Wong can’t stop thinking about food. Whether it’s a steaming bowl of congee, a plate of curry and rice, or her grandma’s fresh strawberry pie, her mind is enraptured by the sights and smells—the excitement of it all. The 22-year-old born-and-bred New Yorker takes these visions of her favorite dishes and translates them into fantastical illustrations, reminiscent of the mouthwatering foods in every Studio Ghibli film. “Drawing has always been a part of how I think about myself and what I do… when you draw a food, there’s so many different textures. If it’s saucy it’s so shiny, if it’s a curry it’s shiny but not that shiny because it has so many bumps in there. When you’re drawing [food], you can do a lot more brush variations. I just like the textures. It’s really nice.”

You do?! Yes! I love that bag. I was like, “Wow, this is so cool,” I don’t even know why. I mean it was definitely the color scheme that got to me. Packages are so nice to look at—seeing so many different kinds of variations of the same thing.

Honestly, what I think it really is, is that in my spare time when I would go into the city, or when I was traveling, I was always trying to go to the grocery store. I don’t even know why. It’s not like I was hungry or that I needed to get groceries, but I always wanted to go and look at the pretty packages. When I was a kid—and this is going to sound really gross—but I used to save candy wrappers that I thought were really cool. I would rinse them out in the sink and prop them up on toothpicks to dry by the window. I had boxes of these weird candy wrappers that I thought were funny; they’d have funny faces on them or just the packaging was really cool. I don’t know, I found it really compelling. I had this one bag of popcorn that I saved that I got in Hawaii. It was seaweed popcorn, it’s called Hurricane Popcorn—

That’s a good question. Growing up, I think [I was mostly influenced by] my family and my dad—my dad went to French cooking school and has always home cooked all my meals, which is something I took for granted. I thought every family always had home cooked meals but as I grew up I learned that some of my friends ate a lot of store bought foods. But my dad was always into making his own vegetable broths and stuff like that. My dad has been a pretty big influence in how I cook and think about food because it’s something that we always shared and were into because we like eating. It is kind of how I feel my dad showed love; he would always surprise us with a special dessert of chocolate souffles or cook my favorite mapo tofu if I wasn’t feeling too good. And also my grandma; she used to own a pie business when my mom was younger so she’s always making these really delicious desserts. Every holiday, my grandma always made a number of different pies: pecan, strawberry rhubarb, pumpkin, lemon meringue, blueberry tart. I spent a lot of my childhood cutting out cookies and making pie crust with my grandma, and after dessert she would always tell me to take a slice for breakfast.

Do you think growing up in New York affected your perception of food? Just because it is such a diverse place and a diverse city.

Yeah. The streetwear one. Cause I like the thought of it not just being food, but having style. It’s like high end food packaging, and it sounds so silly, but the photographs in there are so good. Like Bon Appetit too—there was a time they were doing more artistic layouts of their magazine and they would zoom in super close on the textures; also great page layout and weird photo angles.

What about being mixed-race? Do you feel like that has translated into your art? And if so, in what ways? Cause there’s also a lot of Asian motifs in your work.

Yes, Kat! Big mood. I have so many thoughts on this. Being mixed race has definitely impacted my artwork heavily. In terms of what I felt I was able to draw, or what I have drawn, it’s been very connected to what [relationship] I’ve been feeling with my mixed race identity. It really indicated what I was drawing because earlier on, I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood and those people didn’t really see me as Chinese or Asian. I don’t know—you’d get invalidated all the time like, “Oh, you’re not really Asian” or “what do you mean?” I think that impacted how I drew because I would stop myself from drawing more Asian motifs because I thought if people don’t think I’m Chinese, and that’s not how they’re going to see me, and then see me drawing Asian things and I’m not Asian… I guess because I also knew, because my family is Chinese, we’d talk about how, “Oh, that person is white and they only draw Asian things, that makes me feel weird.” Well I don’t want to be that person—someone who looks white, but only draws Asian things, and makes people who I care about feel weird. That definitely affected whether or not I could draw those things.

But then I started working for CAPAS [the Center for Asian Pacific American Students at Pitzer College] and I did some graphic design and I made food cubes, a variety of Asian soup cubes.

Wow, so that’s where it started?

That’s where it started. I mean my family is Chinese, and I spend a lot of times with my cousins, so there’s that community. But it’s different than being accepted by an outside community, if you know what I mean. I guess I felt like I really had a place in CAPAS [even] when I didn’t feel comfortable in my own identity and [felt] invalidated a lot of the time about whether or not I could be Chinese, if that even makes sense. To be really accepted at CAPAS and feel apart of that community led to a really big acceptance of myself, where I came from, and what had meaning in my life. I was able to say, “No, [my identity] is valid,” regardless of what other people think. Essentially, you can draw whatever you want and it doesn’t necessarily have to indicate something about your identity.

I think it changed for me [also] to see how people responded to my stickers. There were people who said, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen pho as a sticker and this means so much because… it’s special.” I think that meant a lot to me because I was making something I wanted to draw but also making something that people felt happy about. I guess I was serving my community in that way, even though it’s only stickers. I was thinking a lot at that time, like why art? How is it going to help people? And I think that stopped me sometimes. But then people seemed to find something there that wasn’t elsewhere and I think that made me feel more able to pursue art.

So your art is community-driven.