There is a popular Japanese television show that features a segment called ‘Candy Or Not Candy?’. Contestants are presented with objects and must guess if they’re edible or not. Is that a dish sponge – or a steamed sponge cake? I might not consider afternoon tea to be art, but the confectionery artifice required to dupe contestants into mistaking the replica for reality is impressive – or at least entertaining.
The lacquered steaks, fruits, vegetables and sliced bread feel wrong. They surely ought to be matte
The inverse – using inedible materials to create replicas of food – is also a Japanese art form, and the subject of Looks Delicious! at Kensington’s Japan House. The exhibition looks at the practice of making shokuhin sampuru, the display models you’ll see in restaurant windows all over Japan. In the early 20th century, wax sampuru – loaned from the English word ‘sample’ – emerged as a more cost-effective, visually pleasing alternative to putting actual, edible food on display. It has since become a multi-billion-pound industry.
Although the replicas are no longer made with wax but PVC, Looks Delicious! is a sort of Madame Tussauds for food, though slightly less haunted. The beady, black eyes of a shoal of plastic prawns looked up at me from their bento box, somehow even more horrible for having never been alive. An octopus tentacle appears both freshly severed and patently fake – it’s almost too fresh, with flesh of the kind of vibrancy you don’t see even at a fishmonger’s.
Sampuru are the imagined version of reality, more like the memory of eating than the thing remembered – or as the exhibition’s opening placard reads: ‘More real than the real thing.’
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