Jan van Huysum (Dutch, 1682-1749), Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, ca.1720
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Suzuribako writing box, Last third of the 19th century. Box: wood, lacquer, mother-of-pearl, ivory, stone. Techniques: iro-urushi, takamaki-e, hiramaki-e, togidashi, nashiji, ohirame, inlay, carving. Water-dropper: silver, non-ferrous alloys, 24.3 × 22 × 4.9cm

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Pair of vases, Ando workshop, 1910s. Copper alloy, silver, enamel. Height:44.8cm

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Open Reel Ensemble

Open Reel Ensemble Composes Ethereal ‘Magnetic Folklore’ Using Reel-to-Reel Recorders
via: Colossus (also feat. Electronicos Fantasticos).

Woodshedding It

[ed. Persevering at something even though you suck at it.]

Generally speaking, we have lost respect for how much time something takes. In our impatient and thus increasingly plagiarized society, practice is daunting. It is seen as prerequisite, a kind of pointless suffering you have to endure before Being Good At Something and Therefore an Artist instead of the very marrow of what it means to do anything, inextricable from the human task of creation, no matter one’s level of skill.

Many words have been spilled about the inherent humanity evident in artistic merit and talent; far fewer words have been spilled on something even more human: not being very good at something, but wanting to do it anyway, and thus working to get better. To persevere in sucking at something is just as noble as winning the Man Booker. It is self-effacing, humbling, frustrating, but also pleasurable in its own right because, well, you are doing the thing you want to do. You want to make something, you want to be creative, you have a vision and have to try and get to the point where it can be feasibly executed. Sometimes this takes a few years and sometimes it takes an entire lifetime, which should be an exciting rather than a devastating thought because there is a redemptive truth in practice — it only moves in one direction, which is forward. There is no final skill, no true perfection.

Practice is in service not to some abstract arbiter of craft, the insular juries of the world, the little skills bar over a character’s head in The Sims, but to you. Sure, practice is never-ending. Even Yo-Yo Ma practices, probably more than most. That’s also what’s so great about it, that it never ends. You can do it forever in an age where nothing lasts. Nobody even has to know. It’s a great trick — you just show up more improved than you were before, because, for better or for worse, rarely is practice public.

by Kate Wagner, The Late Review |  Read more:

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A sewing and tailoring book from Dublin, complete with samples (1833).

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Imao Keinen (今尾 景年) ‘A Pair of Peacocks in Spring’, a. 1901
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Thelonius Monk
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Sihan Moon, Cold Day in Katmandu
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James Stewart, B. Hummel. Two wild cats in a mountainous landscape. Coloured lithograph by B. Hummel after J. Stewart, 1800-1899.

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Sisyu, One Step at a Time

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Have a seat... 

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Franz Sedlacek (Austrian, 1891-1945) - The Chemist (1932)

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Feast Your Eyes on Japan’s Fake Food

Japanese people like to say that they “eat with their eyes,” relishing the colors, shapes, and textures of a dish before it ever hits the tongue. The phrase applies all the more when the dish in question isn’t meant to be eaten at all. Last year, I was one of two hundred thousand people to visit “Looks Delicious!,” an exhibition organized by the cultural center Japan House London showcasing dozens upon dozens of shokuhin sampuru—mesmerizingly lifelike handmade food replicas that appear in the windows and display cases of restaurants, kiosks, and bars across Japan. Shokuhin sampuru are a roughly ninety-million-dollar industry, and a beloved part of Japanese pop culture. A few decades ago, there was a show on Japanese television in which shokuhin sampuru artisans competed to make the most convincing replicas of dishes, a sort of inverse of “Is It Cake?”

But, according to Japan House, “Looks Delicious!” marks the first time that a cultural institution has dedicated a show exclusively to food replicas. The exhibition originated last year at London’s Japan House and became its most popular show ever—perhaps in part because shokuhin sampuru feel especially pertinent in a political-cultural environment that so often confounds the real and the fake. In September, the show travelled to the Los Angeles branch of Japan House, on Hollywood Boulevard, where it will run until the end of January. A sidewalk full of stars has got nothing, in my opinion, on a stencil used to apply dark-meat detail to the muscle near a mackerel’s spine.

Shokuhin sampuru can be wondrously intricate: iridescent slivers of shrimp; striated sirloins with fatty crusts; bouncy poached eggs on the brink of first ooze; cross-sections of cabbage with the labyrinthine swirls of an elevation map; a banana split with two scoops of chocolate ice cream, their granularity evoking just a whisper of freezer burn. So it is a bit surprising that “Looks Delicious!” begins with, of all things, a humble sack of yellow onions. Simon Wright, the director of programming at Japan House London, told me, during a tour of the gallery, that a different kind of exhibit might have begun with “a whole gantry of sushi,” but that he preferred the alliums for their exuberant plainness. “Remember those strings of plastic onions that might have hung in a restaurant in the nineteen-eighties?” he said. “These are nothing like them.” (...)

According to Yasunobu Nose, a Japanese journalist who has written extensively about shokuhin sampuru, food replicas first appeared in Japan in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when three men started simultaneously producing them in three different cities. This coincidence, Nose explains, was a result of urbanization, which brought workers to big cities, where they began to buy more of their meals outside the home. As early as the Edo period, Japanese people “decided what to eat by looking at real food,” Nose said in a recent lecture at Japan House London. While researching shokuhin sampuru, he found a nineteenth-century genre painting depicting a street festival where merchants displayed actual dishes of sushi and tempura outside their stalls. Shokuhin sampuru were a pragmatic innovation, allowing venders to follow the same long-standing custom without wasting their actual food.

Early shokuhin sampuru were relatively rough replicas molded out of wax; some pioneering artisans were more accustomed to, say, sculpting ear canals for otologists and solar systems for science classes. Even in rudimentary form, they freed customers from having to badger employees with questions or take their chances ordering a bowl of ramen, not knowing whether it would come with two slices of pork or three. Food replicas eased embarrassment, prevented disappointment, and encouraged experimentation, just as they do today. “The Japanese customer loves to know what they’re getting,” the food writer Yukari Sakamoto told me. “When I’m meeting up with my family in Tokyo, we talk and talk and look at the plastic food displays until something jumps out at us.”

The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got the idea for food replicas after watching a candle melt into cold water, its drippings hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy per cent of food replicas sold in Japan...

“Looks Delicious!” focusses on the period beginning in the nineteen-twenties, when Western food began to make inroads in Japan, and restaurateurs—particularly in Tokyo department stores—used replicas to communicate efficiently to prospective clients what, exactly, “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also came to be associated with kissaten—cozy, smoke-filled cafés featuring European décor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have this very retro, Shōwa period, nineteen-fifties-and-sixties vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat crude in this era—they couldn’t be tilted, for example, lest the wax soften and start to droop in the sun—their popularity didn’t suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting a passable rib eye to the United States, to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.

Japan House is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the exhibition’s organizers hit upon a clever way to emphasize the diversity of food replicas and promote tourism at the same time. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisines—a dish for each of the country’s forty-seven prefectures. There is kiritanpo nabe from the mountains of Akita, a hot-pot dish featuring mashed rice wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, and a fish-and-fiddlehead-fern ohaw, a soup from the Ainu people, who live mainly in Hokkaido. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the mouthwatering simulacrum of sudachi-sōmen—wheat-flour noodles in chicken broth, topped with a light-green citrus fruit that grows in Tokushima. (...)

However persuasive they might be as facsimiles, shokuhin sampuru are subjective interpretations, seeking not only to replicate dishes but to intensify the feelings associated with the real thing. Nose told me, “It’s like augmented reality created by skilled artisans. I think this is the magic of replica food.” A replica of red-bean paste, for example, might be grainier than actual red-bean paste, because people tend to associate red-bean paste with graininess. A kiwi might be fuller and greener than usual, because the person who made it likes her fruit especially ripe. Liquids are among the most difficult foodstuffs to render, and leafy greens, raw meats, and emulsions are where real artistry is unleashed. One of the ultimate tests of virtuosity for a shokuhin sampuru maker is said to be whipped cream.

by Lauren Collins, New Yorker |  Read more:

Images: via; and Masuda Yoshirо̄/Courtesy Japan House

[ed. For many more examples, see also: Photos show hyper-realistic plastic food that is a $90 million industry in Japan (MYSA).]

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Robert Remsen Vickrey (1926-2011) — Night Steps, 1997

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