Ryo Arita

I work with food, on food, and around food. The Japanese Zen concept of food as both sustenance and transitory perishable art, pleasing to the senses and meant to be ingested and transformed as life-sustaining energy, is an inspiration for my art.

“Kamikaze Nori Bento”, rendered in Koshihikari ri...

I work with food, on food, and around food. The Japanese Zen concept of food as both sustenance and transitory perishable art, pleasing to the senses and meant to be ingested and transformed as life-sustaining energy, is an inspiration for my art.

“Kamikaze Nori Bento”, rendered in Koshihikari rice and Nori seaweed, are faces of sacrifice in the mediums of the land and sea that sustained them and for which they perished; a powerfully compelling, transitory, visually, physically, and emotionally ingestible, digestible Zen.

Through my use of food-as-media, I confront the common man and the common mass at the survival-instinct level. It is a media at once fragile, perishable, recognizable, transforming, and nourishing. “Sensual Sight and Spirit Bites” is how I view my recent works, ‘Transitory Spiritual Morsels’.

The Japanese Zen concept of food is also how I view my work and creative process: as artwork – beautiful, powerfully-compelling to primary instincts; and statements made in a media perishable, edible, yet timeless: physically, and emotionally compelling “Sound Bites”; “Spiritual Hors d’ Oeuvres –In-Time”, for man on his multi-levels of existence.