Most of you would have picked up some new hobby during the quarantine days. Cake baking, basket weaving and puzzling have been some of the most popular among them. The quarantine hobby taken up by the Japanese artist, Manami Sasaki is unique, which is toast art. She created art masterpieces on the carb canvas, with homages to Picasso and Mondrian. She crafted recreations of Edo-era paintings, American comic book art and abstract nods to Mickey Mouse on a simple toast.
As there is more time to spend at home, she makes stunning art out of toast, and all she needs for the creation is the food, a sewing needle and a butter knife. Her work mostly features edible flowers, trees, and even portraits. She believes in creating art on the toast in a way that people who see it feel like it is delicious. Sasaki considers it important to make sure that the food she makes tastes good.
Most of the artworks by Sasaki are inspired from Japanese culture and traditions. This makes the artworks to be so natural, with traditional Japanese rock gardens, dances, paintings and anime characters. The ingredients that she incorporates in her food art are also that can be mostly found in Japanese kitchens such as tomatoes, sour cream, fish, seaweed, nuts, and fish.
Life And Studies
Sasaki started getting paid for her work when she was in high school. She currently works as an artist in a design company and also exhibits at various venues in Tokyo. She was mostly into conceptual art, but since she has been at home for quarantine, she started making edible art. As she has been drawing since her childhood, she took realism for granted since she was in her elementary school. She also had great interest in accidental expression through watercolour and oil paintings. While attending college in Tokyo, Sakaki immersed herself in art and design. Sasaki who works mainly with conceptual art considers toast art more as a habit than artwork. She believes in the principle that creativity has no boundaries.
Sasaki takes around three hours from start to finish to create each piece of toast art. Once she gets down on a concept, and walks to her local supermarket to get the ingredients. Sasaki is very picky about which material to choose, so that she gets the expected colour and shape after heat is applied. To bring the orange slickness of a goldfish what she would use is prosciutto, to represent the regal feel of a kimono she uses a purple cabbage, and for the centrepiece of a summer flower she uses blueberries.
Toast As A Medium
Sasaki chose toast as a medium for her food art, with the reason that she has eaten bread every day since she was born. She thought expressing art on toast as a natural progression and realised the opportunity of showing her talent to the world, as well as to connect with other Japanese creators. She brought on Japanese culture as a subject on most of the toast art she did. 80 percent of her followers on Instagram are international, so that she was excited to introduce Japanese culture and art to the rest of the world. She used nothing but bread and the text to express the appeal of the subject she created.
The baking of bread is what Sasaki enjoys the most in the creative process of toast art. She finds it as a moment where her creativity meets with the preparation of food. The sight of toasted art getting baked while smelling the goodness of bread is something that she loves the most and makes her want to eat it fast.
Social Media Activity
Sasaki used to post amazing watercolour illustrations on her website and Instagram, before she started making incredible toast art. During the quarantine days, Sasaki used to post the stylized toast art results on her Instagram profile. The lockdown is what made her start doing toast art at her kitchen in Tokyo. Working from home made her to wake up late and get lazy for the other one and a half hours that it took her to commute to work. She chose toast art for breakfast as a reason to wake up early in the morning and create a routine that excites her.
Sasaki considers it important to make sure that the food art she creates is not only an aesthetic exercise, but also tastes delicious. She doesn’t make use of any artificial ingredients in her toast art and she eats all of the breakfast after she makes them. While using blueberries for making on a flower toast, she also includes sesame cream, sour cream, and chervil topped off with honey drizzle to make sure that the food will not disappoint when consumed. Also read about British Artist SHOK-1.
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