Richard Perin, Food for thought (you are what you eat) (ART 2026)

These photos are part of a series which unfolds in stark black and white, its tonal austerity echoing the moral ambiguity at its core. On a long, lacquer table lies a plastic mannequin—an object already stripped of humanity—posed in the traditional arrangement of nyotaimori*. But here, the substitution is deliberate: both body and food are synthetic, a closed loop of consumption in which nothing is alive, nothing nourishes, and yet everything imitates desire. The photographs lean into this uncanny flatness, reminding the viewer of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s fascination with artificial bodies and Hans Bellmer’s charged, disquieting constructions. The mannequin’s skin, overlit, gleams like polished bone; shadows pool in the joints where articulation gives way to the illusion of flesh. Each image interrogates the spectacle of consumption by removing the biological body entirely. Instead, the mannequin is framed as an almost ceremonial offering, recalling Andres Serrano’s forensic minimalism—cool, critical, and unblinking. Plastic sushi rests on the abdomen, its shine identical to the hollow shine of the torso beneath it. The mise-en-scène denies any hierarchy between object and objectified: both are props, both are commodities. This equivalence resonates with Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulacra—the idea that contemporary culture consumes signs rather than realities, copies rather than originals. In these photos, the viewer faces a world where even eroticism is outsourced to its own replica. In the early frames, the face of the mannequin is photographed, reminiscent of Edward Weston’s clinical yet reverent studies of the human form. But the reverence here is hollow; the surface perfection is mass-manufactured. In the next few frames, the camera pulls in close to the plastic food—faux tuna, faux ginger, faux gloss—its textures echoing the plasticity of the body beneath. The following frames then merge both into a near-abstract composition of curves and reflections, flattening distinctions between body, plate, and product. The sequence suggests that modern consumerism doesn’t merely commodify the body; it dissolves the boundary between the edible and the erotic, the corporeal and the commercial. Throughout the series, I am trying to articulate a visual language reminiscent of Daido Moriyama’s high-contrast grain and Cindy Sherman’s self-aware artifice. The plastic mannequin becomes a stand-in for all bodies subjected to the gaze, while the absence of living flesh removes any opportunity for emotional or sensual connection. Instead, the viewer is left with the repetitive aesthetics of display—hyper-stylised, sterile, and transactional. One photograph clearly shows the mannequin’s plastic vulva, in contrast to most mannequins on public display, and somewhat reminiscent of a flesh light. Academically, the images sit comfortably within feminist critiques of objectification—from Laura Mulvey’s writing on the eroticized gaze to Judith Butler’s ideas about the performed nature of the body. But the series goes further, aligning itself with contemporary scholarship on posthumanism. By replacing the body with its plastic double, the photos ask: when consumption governs representation, what remains of embodiment at all? The mannequin becomes the logical endpoint of a culture that values bodies most when they are mute, controllable, and interchangeable – commodities of exchange. In many of the photographs, the scene is lit from both above and below, giving the mannequin’s form a ghostly translucence. The food, too, glows like preserved artifacts. The overall effect recalls Man Ray’s surrealist experiments—objects removed from context and suspended in an uncanny new logic. Here, the ritual of nyotaimori* is no longer erotic nor cultural but conceptual: an autopsy of consumer desire. The table becomes a stage where modern society reveals its appetite not for nourishment or intimacy but for surfaces—consumption for consumption’s sake. What emerges is a series of photographs that is not about the body at all, but about the erasure of the body beneath layers of symbolism, commerce, and spectacle. By using only plastic, and not a live model, I have tried to underscore the hollowness of the transaction. These images do not ask us to condemn or celebrate nyotaimori*i; instead, they ask us to consider what happens when even the images and symbols we consume have become simulations—beautiful, glossy, and entirely empty. A pertinent question that becomes more pointed in the age of Artificial intelligence. It’s not lost on me that wealthy nations already invest billions of dollars in the development of augmented realities and robotics and that much of that investment is in porn and life like sex dolls, on junk food and junk food advertising. You are what you eat - Food for thought.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.