Inspired by the album cover of the children’s song On Top of Spaghetti, Noodle Mountain contemplates the deeply personal memories as well as the complex intergenerational histories of place, labor, and diaspora that food can conjure.

Colette first traveled to Yunnan Province in 1994 to teach English, beginning a 30-year period of research and exploration of the region. With the support of a Fulbright Fellowship, she began photographing for We Are Tiger Dragon People in 2008. Yunnan is home to twenty-five of China’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minority groups, which together comprise less than 9% of the country’s population, while the Han make up the majority. Her connection to the region became increasingly personal through her mother’s Nuosu Yi heritage and her family’s roots in the Greater Liangshan Mountains.

Tao Yuanming, a Jin Dynasty (317-420 CE) poet, wrote of a traveler who came upon an isolated peach blossom valley beyond a cave where people seeking political refuge lived an ideal, harmonious life with nature and each other.