Over the past few years, I have become a resident of Sleman and have come across many rice fields, even across from the housing complex where I live. The cycle of life in the rice fields and the activities within them become a fleeting part of daily life. From a distance, the fields appear green, indicating young rice plants. Then gradually, they turn yellowish-brown, indicating that the harvest season is approaching. Until now, I have only seen rice as a mass-planted crop, from which we enjoy the grains every day as our staple food. What if we observe it closer as an individual plant?

Sure enough, the closer you look, the more uniqueness you see. It turns out, within a single rice plant, there is only one leaf per stem, the top leaf is called the flag leaf, and the rice flowers or panicles emerge from the leaf sheath, and so on. These details may have been overlooked by our untrained eyes and thus need to be immortalized in art.

Many small parts need to be drawn, so I chose coloured pencils as my medium to showcase these details. Several times venturing into the fields, however, was still not enough to get a complete picture of rice. Documentation from scientific journals was very helpful in getting an idea of the parts that needed to be observed under a microscope.

And so, this artwork came to be, depicting the life of rice from flowering, to grain formation, to ripening. The composition of this piece refers to the famous proverb: ‘The fuller the rice, the more it bends.’ Through this artwork, may we all appreciate the long journey behind a plate of rice that we enjoy.