Today’s food creators are blithely blurring the lines between culinary and visual masterpieces

During a sweltering summer’s day in the Japanese capital, an edible sculpture constructed of rougetinted chocolate kisses spiralled towards the ceiling of a gallery opposite the Tokyo Tower. Floating next to the chocolate centrepiece were two pairs of giant red lips mounted on Plexiglass and composed of thousands of spherical red bonbons. Guests were encouraged to approach the artwork and pluck the candies from the clear canvas with their mouths. Over the course of an hour, the pieces morphed and waned, but pastry chef Janice Wong, who had created the installation, looked on with approval.

“My work is meant to be interactive, and I see it as more of an experience than a product,” she says, noting that the changing appearance of the art is part of the fun, a reflection of the impermanent nature of her medium – pastry.

Wong, the owner and chef of 2am:dessertbar and lab in Singapore, is also one of the world’s leading food artists. The pâtissier first made waves with an edible landscape that included a ceiling dripping with marshmallow-and-seaweed stalactites and walls lined with lychee-infused jelly drops. Since then, she has been flying around the world to produce massive installations made of confections. Recently, Wong opened an eponymous sweets boutique that features a section where customers can produce their own candy art.

Food has served as inspiration and medium for many contemporary artists, evoking desire, anger or delight. Think of Claes Oldenburg’s gargantuan inverted ice cream cone on top of a shopping centre in Germany, or Canadian artist Terence Koh’s sculptures of Michael Jackson moulded from Hershey’s chocolate. The idea that edible art could offer a delicious, rather than purely intellectual, experience is relatively new, but today’s food creators are blithely blurring the lines between culinary and visual arts. As a chef, Wong strives to bring gustatory pleasure through her creations, and she sees food as a playful way to bridge cultural differences. “A lollipop is never just a lollipop,” she says. “What’s considered acceptable to eat varies from country to country.”

Japanese artist Ayako Suwa uses food to explore “the possibilities of taste” and emotions. Her inspiration comes from nature, and her art – which is displayed in galleries and luxury retail shops or woven into her travelling “Guerilla Restaurant” performances – is visceral and provocative. Suwa says the aim is to reignite a primal sense of curiosity. As a child, the budding artist presented her playmates with dishes composed of found objects such as plants, shells and insects, and this fascination with the intersection between taste and imagination persists in her work. “Food does not merely pass from the mouth to the stomach,” she says.

Combining her training as an artist with an intuitive feel for ingredients, Suwa creates edible sculptures in miniature that juxtapose unusual flavours and textures. A cut plum filled with balsamic vinegar and topped with red seaweed becomes a “lingering taste of regret with overtones of anger welling up,” while “shame and joy” is a combination of mushroom, fresh cream and mint.

“My work is not about nutritional value, a gourmet experience or familiar tastes. The people who decide to eat my food are seeking a ‘new value of food’ that is closely tied to instinct and curiosity,” Suwa says.

“Imagine the feeling of a primitive man when he discovered a sea cucumber for the first time.”