Where was I?  In the Tate Modern with Salvadore Dali’s lobster telephone?  In the RA’s memorable exhibition of Picasso’s ceramic fish on a plate?  In the National Gallery, looking at Dutch and Spanish !7C still lives by de Heem or Zurbaran? In the National Portrait Gallery with Sam Taylor-Johnson’s ‘Self Portrait in Single-Breasted Suit with Hare’? The Design Museum’s ‘SUPERMARKET’ installation during lock-down?   In MoMA, with Claes Oldenburg’s ‘The Store’ looking at giant soft food sculptures such as Floor Burger, or the outsize Giant BLT, complete with cocktail stick?

Yet, ‘Looks Delicious!’ is in a class of its own. It is neither surreal, nor using art to make the ordinary extraordinary, nor critiquing a commodification of art.  The business of replica food models started functionally, in the 1920’s in a well-known department store in Tokyo as in-house dining started to become fashionable. It was hugely successful in attracting customers.  As American and European visitors increased in the subsequent decades, replica food became a means of translating and visually communicating a foreign culture’s food menu by dispensing with language. At the same time, it introduced Japanese diners to equally foreign Western dishes.

The exhibition follows the development of materials from wax to resin and PVC and the crafting of realism in colour, texture and detail spanning foods from regions all over Japan. Not everything is lies flat to the plate. Among my favourite exhibits are bowls of noodles with a self-standing ready mouthful, lifted on chopsticks as if suspended in mid-air, just at the moment before being popped into the mouth. Some models are so bright and glistening that they become hyper-realistic crabs, shiny pearls of caviar or tiers of ice cream sundae with deep red mingling and dripping sauces.

Japan is not alone in possessing a world of food artifice but it is undeniably fascinating to discover how, what elsewhere, might be considered a niche industry, has grown to shape and be shaped by such a nationally universal social and consumer response. While 70% of Japanese replica food is produced by the Iwasaki group, growing out of the original dedicated company and creator Iwasaki Takizo (1895-1965), in the UK Replica Ltd. based in Buckinghamshire, houses equally skilled artisans. They provide food models for an expanding range of food suppliers’ displays and heritage settings (Harrods to Hampton Court Palace), film, theatre and TV as well as for export. Food Tech of Riyadh producer of replica food in the Middle East, describes how creating convincing models of non-local food for use in marketing, is constrained by cultural unfamiliarity.  3D artisan skill is dependent on deep familiarity with the original dish, its attributes and its quintessential gastronomic experience.  Yet cost, quality and practicality make ordering a foreign dish from abroad for accurate local replication difficult just as is sending local dishes abroad for foreign replica manufacture. Drawing on Japan’s institutions, Food Tech aims to develop technology to enable sustainable food marketing for its own regional producers in ways that are creative and minimise waste.

Back to ‘Looks Delicious’, the exhibition will take you on many journeys in many fields of art and artistry while all the time, hovering like the famous enigmatic smile, is the perennial question of the new and unexpected – but is it art or even meant to be?  So many possibilities and does it matter if it looks delicious?