Food replica of a popular yōshoku dish. Jeremie Souteyrat photo, ©Japan House London, courtesy Japan House London.

By James D. Balestrieri

LONDON — Mimesis. Verisimilitude. Realism. Hyperrealism. The faithful, scrupulous representation of reality, of things as they seem and as we see them, is often slotted into Western culture as an expression of the Western philosophical tradition. In one famous myth, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, Greek artists from the Fourth Century BCE, competed to determine which was the better painter. Zeuxis, so the story goes, painted grapes so real that birds tried to eat them. Afterwards, he visited Parrhasius and asked him to remove the curtain from his painting — only to find that the curtain was itself the painting. Zeuxis conceded, stating that while his grapes had tricked the birds, Parrhasius’s curtain had tricked not only a man, but an artist.

From the Western point of view, “other” cultures “symbolize” reality. That is, they locate reality, aesthetically and artistically, in forms we see as reduced or abstract. In the past, this dichotomy has been termed “civilized” versus “primitive.” Realism, of course, is purely a matter of perception. What appears real to one culture may be unrecognizable to another. Reality is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Someone raised on the Greek and Romans, on the artists of the Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age and on the various realisms that ensued — at least until Impressionism and the spread of the arts of Asia, Africa and Indigenous peoples the world over began to complicate things — might not think of Japanese art as “realistic,” though a quick look at renderings of trees, insects, birds and people should certainly cause that someone to think twice.

Installation photo. Jeremie Souteyrat photo, ©Japan House London, courtesy Japan House London.

If that didn’t convince our hypothetical someone, a stroll through “Looks Delicious! Exploring Japan’s Food Replica Culture” at Japan House, London, should do the trick.

Trick.

In the Western artistic tradition, we call hyperrealistic artworks, the ones we say, “look like photographs,” trompe l’oeil, which is French for “trick of the eye.” Both European and American trompe l’oeil painting really hearkens back to Zeuxis and Parrhasius, where the “trick” is simple to fool the viewer’s eye and elicit amazement at the artist’s skill.

But what if the purpose of a trompe l’oeil artwork isn’t simply to amaze; what if its purpose is to entice?

Have you looked at the images on these pages? Hungry yet? Enticed?

You should know up front that you are not looking at dishes from the splendid and beautiful cuisines of Japan. Instead, you are looking at food replicas, or shokuhin sanpuru, meticulously molded and painted replicas of dishes you find in the windows of restaurants throughout Japan. Rarely seen outside Japan, the hyperrealistic representations in “Looks Delicious!” offer viewers an opportunity to learn the fascinating history of these unique works of art.

Cream soda replicas at Iwasaki’s Sakai Factory in Osaka. Jeremie Souteyrat photo, ©Japan House London, courtesy Japan House London.

The story of shokuhin sanpuru begins, as the exhibition information states, in the early Twentieth Century, as Japan adapted to the West’s “department store dining culture and the need in particular to familiarize a curious yet cautious public with unfamiliar yōshoku (‘Western food’) dishes. In 1923, Shirokiya, one of Japan’s oldest department stores, opened a dining hall in Tokyo with food replicas on display outside the hall. Having seen the array of dishes on offer, diners then purchased a corresponding meal ticket, in a system that prioritized both visual marketing and commercial efficiency. The success of the innovation led to the adoption of food replicas by other department stores and eventually by small restaurants across Japan.”

Nine years later, Iwasaki Takizō formed the first company devoted to the production of food replicas. Today, the Iwasaki companies comprise about three-fourths of the Japanese market. Many restaurants rent rather than purchase food replicas, replacing them when their colors fade or the menu changes. Japan’s cuisine is varied and diverse and each of Japan’s 47 prefectures is represented in the exhibition with a food replica specially commissioned from the Iwasaki Group.

At first, food replicas were fashioned in wax, using molds. Today, molds are made by pouring silicon over actual ingredients and the dishes made from them. PVC is then poured into these molds and the resulting three-dimensional objects are then painted by hand.

Painting silicon food mold of Hakusai cabbage. Masuda Yoshiro photo, ©Japan House London, courtesy Japan House London.

Perhaps if that were the end of it, one might name the creation of shokuhin sanpuru as a craft rather than an art and call their makers artisans rather than artists.

But here’s the trick.

The artists — for they are artists, as you will shortly agree — do not simply make the shokuhin sanpuru as realistic representations; they make them more than real, drawing on the “memory of the food in people’s imaginations,” by enhancing a particular color or texture to suggest, say, “perfect ripeness,” or a preferred flavor. Different artists specialize in, say, crispy chicken, or sour strawberries.

Perhaps because there is humor in the whole idea of enticing diners to dine by displaying replicas of the items on the menu in the restaurant windows, the shokuhin sanpuru artists often inject notes of whimsy into their work. In one replica, a forkful of noodles defies gravity, hovering above a dish of yōshoku as if an invisible diner is about to take a bite. The implication here is that you should step into that invisible diner’s spot, taking their place and enjoying the slurp of the noodles and the zing of the spice. In another, a crab turns the tables. Instead of being eaten, it refreshes itself, sipping on a frosty mug of beer with a face full of suds, as if it about to sigh, “Ahhhh…” An iPhone case is a replica of a sunny side up fried egg flanked by strips of bacon, and a sky-high burger is piled with works no burger lover has ever thought of.

Food replica of an egg and bacon. Jeremie Souteyrat photo, ©Japan House London, courtesy Japan House London.

When you see an array of the replicas in a single image, the effect, quite suddenly, recalls the still life paintings of Pompeii, or, even better, those of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Flemish and Dutch painters such as Clara Peeters and Willem Claesz. As in the shokuhin sanpuru of Japan, the feeling in the Flemish and Dutch still lifes is one of abundance, mouth-watering abundance. In all of these works is a sense of their ephemerality, and of the ephemerality of the moment. Where the Dutch still life paintings and the shokuhin sanpuru stop time, halting the inevitable decay of the comestibles and dishes they portray, those comestibles and dishes won’t last forever. If their perfection happens to meet our hunger — or happens to inspire our hunger — we turn into the restaurant and ask to be seated. The European idea behind these still life paintings, the “vanitas” notion that life is brief and we ought to focus our attention on the eternal, spiritual verities suddenly does a 180 and hits us where we live, in our stomachs, in the here and now and in the sweet anticipation of a satisfying meal.

Clara Peeters’s food paintings, I must admit, have never made me feel particularly spiritual. I find myself wondering what kind of cheese she painted, where she got it, what she called it, how it smelled, how it tasted. All of these artworks, European and Japanese, share another kind of abundance, an abundance that contributes, subtly yet effectively, to the viewer’s desire to partake — detail. It’s the rice curling around the bento box of grilled eel in “Unagi from Shizuoka Prefecture” that marks this as a dish redolent of sweet sauce and charcoal. It’s the fact that the cubes of tofu aren’t quite perfect and only partially submerged in broth in “Yu-dōfu from Kyoto Prefecture.” In other words, it’s the detail that leads to individuality in each shokuhin sanpuru that makes them universally appealing.

Selection of food samples on display. Masuda Yoshiro photo, ©Japan House London, courtesy Japan House London.

Almost certainly because I have had oysters, raw and grilled, and cold, cold beer in shacks in coves in coastal towns, the “Grilled Oysters from Hiroshima Prefecture” and that beer the crab appears to be gloating over are calling me. Despite knowing that they are nothing more than painted PVC, I have fallen victim to the “memory of the food in people’s imaginations” that is the precise intention of the shokuhin sanpuru. The image prompts memory, memory sparks imagination, and, in true Pavolvian fashion, my mouth begins to water and I wonder where I might find oysters and cold beer.

And because they are calling me, I project my memory of the taste of such delicacies and imagine old Zeuxis and old Parrhasius coming up against one of the shokuhin sanpuru artists, reaching for an oyster or a mug of beer, and finding themselves both bested. They would laugh at first, then suddenly look very serious and say, “But there is beer, isn’t there?” and “But there are oysters, aren’t there?” I imagine the shokuhin sanpuru artist pointing to a restaurant and saying, “Just over there.” And then, “I think I’ll join you.”

It is a wonder that the rest of the world hasn’t adopted the shokuhin sanpuru. Some restaurants display pictures in their windows, but in the case of food, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a shokuhin sanpuru, as “Looks Delicious! Exploring Japan’s Food Replica Culture” appetizingly demonstrates, is worth a thousand pictures.

“Looks Delicious! Exploring Japan’s Food Replica Culture” is at Japan House London, until February 16.
Japan House London is at 101-111 Kensington High Street. For information, www.japanhouselondon.uk.