Maythe Han | Platypus

Dining With Dogs: More-than-Human Relations in Food Media

 Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam, Maythe Han  November 26, 2024

Human and nonhuman lives may have first become closely entangled with the rise of agriculture as we raised both animals to eat and other animals that could help us manage the animals we raised to eat. However, the relationality between humans and animals has expanded beyond such survivalist functions. Today, we share our homes and, as we will discuss in this post, our food and eating practices with them as valued members of more-than-human families, co-participating and co-producing our complex and ever-evolving cultures surrounding food. (read more...)

The Practice of Not Knowing

 Maythe Han  September 17, 2024

This is a comic that explores the affective experience of sharing a built environment and material cultures, making and re-making more-than-human kinship, and dealing with anticipatory grief with a senior and reactive dog. It touches on the core themes of uncertainty and unknowability—and by extension, speculative imagination—inherent in multispecies entanglements, tying it inextricably to the preemptive grief that arises from living with a senior, and increasingly tired, dog who no longer has the same energy he once did, especially when faced with a motorcycle. It engages with the various emotional valences of everyday life shared with a nonhuman companion. The comic has two pages and 11 panels. It is drawn digitally on a white background with black 6B pencil brush on a tablet. Panel 1: I don’t know where Frank, my nine-year-old collie, has been for the first two years of his life. (Drawing of a young border collie puppy) (read more...)

Drawing More-than-Human Kinship

 Maythe Han  August 3, 2023

In my work as an anthropological ethnographer and illustrator, I have been working to connect seemingly disparate disciplines together—at times, even as a messy and rough bricolage. Thinking broadly about kinship—both intra- and inter-species—as a fundamental and foundational practice toward a mutually thriving future, I experiment with different formats and genres to reimagine what it means to produce ethnographic work. This reimagined work is not only informative but also beautiful, like the kinship I experience with my dog, Frank, who is depicted in the illustrations below. My investment in beauty is also an intentional form of resistance against neoliberal capitalist systems that prioritise profit, results, and efficiency over beauty, process, and patience. It matters that the illustrations in this series are digital. Using a software called Procreate on the 11” iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, I actualise my imaginations on the screen. That is, this specific combination of technologies (read more...)