The Poverty Line (Tomatoes) (India)
Stefen Chow
Singaporean, born 1980
Huiyi Lin
Singaporean, born 1980
2010-2020
A color inkjet photograph of ripe tomatoes arranged on a Hindi newspaper, using a familiar food item to dramatize how the cost and availability of everyday goods define the lived “poverty line.”
The tomatoes’ glossy, saturated red leaps off the matte black‑and‑white newsprint—tiny columns of text and celebrity faces recede while the round fruits, their highlights and shadows, form a rhythmic, almost clinical inventory across the page.
By turning grocery items into photographic evidence, the piece makes abstract measures of poverty visible and relatable, part of a broader design and documentary impulse to translate economic data into everyday, human terms.
Medium
Inkjet print
Dimensions
each: 15 9/16 × 22 13/16" (39.5 × 58 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of the Fund for the Twenty-first Century and Committee on Architecture and Design Funds
Accession
95.2023.11
Palette
Exhibitions
