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.’ Beneath this, a few onions appear to have tumbled out of a burlap sack. It’s a very simple model, but contrived in such a way as to trigger memories of the flaky, wax-paper-like skin and the juiciness of fresh onions without you noticing the exaggerated nature of it all.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a display of 47 sampuru commissioned from Iwasaki Mokei, the company which manufactures by hand around 85 per cent of the replicas on the market. Each dish represents a prefecture in Japan – Koshu grapes from Yamanashi, Kobe beef from Hyogo, takoyaki from Osaka, and so on. In the gallery lighting, the banquet bears the glossy quality of an oil painting, the resin reflecting like daubs of bright white paint. This evokes the mouthfeel (surely the Japanese have a more sophisticated word for it) of runny yolks, sugar glazes, glossy noodles and wine, but the lacquered steaks, fruits, vegetables and sliced bread feel wrong. They surely ought to be matte. The most charming replicas are the retro ice cream sundaes and melon soda floats, made to sit besides impossibly smooth hotcakes in the windows of jun-kissa (‘pure cafes’), popular during Japan’s Showa era and now making a comeback among generations nostalgic for a world they never knew.
I imagine the fake maraschino cherries on top of these are not wildly different from their sulfuric originals. Less pleasant are Iwasaki’s ventures into health and medical education. One table displays the liquefied fat content of a croissant in a vial, while at the far end is a blood vessel simulator, used by doctors to practise inserting catheters into arteries.
These replicas have nothing to do with eating and everything to do with looking
You might think the art of sampuru is a bit redundant now thanks to colour printing and Instagram. But I would argue that the advance of technology has made these replicas even more suited to our time. An endless, undecaying feast, for the eyes only: isn’t that what I spend hours ogling on foodie social media?
Looks Delicious! is a jaunt through the hyperreal, its own delightful little world. These replicas have nothing to do with eating and everything to do with looking. While there’s much nostalgia to this exhibition and the odd feeling of being trapped inside a 1970s dinner-party cookbook, as I walked around I couldn’t help but think that humanity had finally arrived at the perfect future. Imagine it: supplements, Huel and semaglutide injections catering to our nutritional needs while the food itself becomes nothing more than a pretty plastic ornament, devoid of calories and free from vice. Something we can finally enjoy without guilt.
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