Installation / Three-Dimensional Works

REVIEW: "Mountains of Bento Meals from Convenience Stores－Time is money."

In a Japan where all things economy are given first priority, various negative things are going on in the shady parts of everyday life. One of them is the disposal of leftover food. Shintaku, whose education includes next to studies at art university also training at a culinary school, chose this problem as a central theme for his creative work.
According to the artist’s calculation, the number of bento (lunch) boxes discarded by convenience stores of a certain chain across Japan every day after their sell-by date amounts to a total of about 510,000 sets(255 million yen). These are indeed startling numbers, and the first thing I want to express here is that I was honestly shocked to learn about this fact.
So how can this topic be addressed in the realm of art? Aiming at discarded “convenience store bento meals”, for this exhibition the artist combined a certain conceptual approach and its visual representation. The thoroughly careful way he determines the components of his works and related them to the main theme is probably something that lies in the artist’s nature. The motif of the clock suggests the expiry dates, with the sounds of cash registers’ barcode scanners working like time signals. The ridgeline of the mountain of disposed food hints at the changing GDP, while the colors at the panels’ sides represent the convenience store chain’s three symbol colors.
Excellent in terms of conceptual consistency, the work was full of expressions beyond logic, which can certainly be attributed to the painted images of discarded food. Rather than aesthetic requirements, the paintings are indeed based on the colors and shapes of various circulating foods and related products (such as fried food, spaghetti, or those little green plastic baran dividers in bento boxes). In other words, these are paintings that mark a clear departure from aesthetic artistic expression. Nonetheless, the images that these objective depictions of food project are so bizarre that they leave an impression that is absolutely beyond description, almost in a surrealist kind of way. Manifestations of Tomoni Shintaku’s own individual point of view, these works are completely different from the cynical depictions of food in the consumer society that Andy Warhol made by painting cans of Campbell’s soup.
Itaru HIRANO (Chief Curator, Museum of Modern art, Saitama)

By TWS-Emerging 2016 Program

Concept behind the "Mountains of Bento Meals from Convenience Stores＠CCC"

We convert the quantity of bento meals from convenience stores that are disposed daily; an average of 30 bento meals per store is observed to be disposed.
For example, this amounts to a cost of 255 million yen for 510, 000 meals, assuming 17,000 Seven-Eleven stores.
This amount is lost by each convenience store company branch, 365 days a year.
Therefore, it is a simple idea: if we collect these discarded convenience store bento meals and pile them up, they will form a mountain.
Of course, we do not actually see such a mountain in reality; however, this series expresses the work which surely embodies the heap of existing convenience stores’ bento meals in Japan.
I believe this mountain to be sacred. From the Japanese religion perspective, which finds a god in a rice grain, naturally gods live in rice, fried chicken, omelet, spaghetti, and pickle.
And there are gods to one one.
In the end, it seems natural that a myriad of gods live in that mountain. Thus, it should be called a sacred mountain.
But these gods are disposable, and sometimes they die with the food’s expiry date.
And they might be reborn anywhere.
Or they are powerless and deserve to be thrown away and slaughtered.
However, in the first place, when considering the problems involved, no gods should be here.
We are being asked these questions when confronted by the bento meal mountains; in short, these are modern religious paintings.

Concept behind the "Shintaku's Three-Minute Painting@DESK/okumura"

Multiplied by the "Joseph Kosuth" and "QP 3 minutes cooking", it is a work that meaning was also reconstructed, including the parody. The most famous work of Joseph Kosuth, there is a work called "chair, the chair photo, chair of the items in the dictionary," juxtaposed three of the "one and three chairs." This, at the same time presenting three chairs, in which attempts to represent a single chair as a concept of a mono (can not be visualized). In addition, QP 3 minutes cooking is the Japan of longevity program to introduce the "simple recipe enough to be in the 3 minutes" (the actual broadcast time is 10 minutes). In this work, based on the two or more, by presenting a "painting, the use of painting material, painting method (recipe)", presents the fact that each is a pictorial. That is, a representation of a "one and three paintings". January 2016, Tokyo-East Bridge of artist-run space "DESK / okumura" exhibition work to Naoki Okumura Roh friend exhibition was held at.

Concept behind the "Cup Noodles Waterfall＠HAGISO"

"Are you hungry?"
A cup noodle comical commercial film flew on tubes with such a catchphrase in 1992.
It was 23 years ago and then I was 10. It was a primitive man was run after by a mammoth and made me fun but I didn't know and understand what that meant.
Then 23 years passed. And I, who came to know a lot about various things including Are you hungry, will hold the private exhibition called "the waterfall of the cup noodle" I hang a picture scroll-formed more than 5m that I right described a cup noodle in like a waterfall from the ceiling of the colonnade and spread approximately 50, 000 disposable chopsticks all over the floor.
The audience stands in there and people who soak headphones with a sound to slurp a cup noodle trailingly is endless and they look up at the waterfall of the cup noodle. It seems an answer to Are you hungry?
In the people who were able to watch that commercial, ｗould there be the person who was really hungry? I don't think so. But cup noodles are keeping consumed and 30 billion meals exceeded in 80 countries. 50 billion? 100 billion meals?It's just a matter of time. And in that time will the world be fulfilled with happiness?

Concept behind the "Beef Bowl Person/Instant Noodle Person"

Beef bowl or cup noodles, eaten work to the inertia manner Often. Eating is also anything without that live, somehow, for the time being, be eaten. For example, in a mobile one hand, for example, while watching TV, delicious either went wrong or, in the first place if it is what's, while becoming the most unidentified, anyway falls down to the stomach is carried to the mouth. It is difficult to find meaning and significance to eat there aggressive.
This series, so the eat beef bowl / cup noodles, and still is even more dull by being thorough, is an attempt to Daso roast the essence of eating behavior for the modern people. The actual pottery and containers, inset the beef bowl / cup noodles of the picture (the concept), flows through the sound to swallow endlessly chewing from there. By doing so, hunger also satiety also, emotions emotion without any, while losing both meaning purpose, anyway come to stand up "someone" is endlessly eat continue. It is also true that it is our own, is a person of the people / cup noodle of beef bowl.

Concept behind the "Beef bowl Waterfall installation ver."

The waterfall series of the following beef bowl is an installation that is based on.
"Gyudon is a typical fast food in Japan and shows us the three concepts of foods. In short, foods should be fast, cheap and tasty.
It will be delivered to people super quickly and one can pour it into a throat in the twinkling of an eye. That action is colored with automation, task processing and eating it as a calorie. It is a dietary culture that means washing it down ; not tasting it ; not enjoying it. It was disappeared perfectly that the idea to eat is to live would give us the view of life or moral value.
This fact eating machanically is not special thing in our developed countries of gluttony. But if you really think about it, don't you feel alarmed? These anxiety and posing a problem are depicted as Gyudon symbolically. And the image that it is falling both endlessly and disorderly to stomach of the public is expressed with the constract like the Streams of falling Gyudon.
*Gyudon is a Japanese popular food consisting of a bowl of rice topped with beef and onion simmered in a mildly sweet sauce flavored with dashi, soy sauce and mirin. "
A painting of a waterfall of beef bowl as a screen to project the image that is eating beef bowl edited to speed in the projector. In addition, the flow of voice a mix of chewing sound and swallowing sound endless. By doing so, and at the same time give the painting to the time of being a moment stationary, promote a multi-layered and complicated of illusion in painting. In addition, the projection by the projector, there is so to speak, although also an act fill the painting with light, also in an attempt to let us get over the medium of traditional painting.