People who live to feast. Food Stylist "Dress the Food" President Kaoru

Later, in my late 20s, I became very ill and suddenly found myself in the hospital for a long period of time. While some people had died of the same illness, I was fortunate to be saved by the help of many people, and it was an experience that gave me a chance to live my life again. At this time, as a distraction, I was making a 360-degree collage around the walls of my hospital room, cutting out pictures of memorable places, including pictures of vegetables from the New York farmer's market that I had taken and kept taking. Places I wanted to go, foods I wanted to eat. I looked at them every day and spent my time pining for them and hoping that one day I would get to go there again.

While in the hospital, I was mostly only allowed to eat heated food, but then my meals were full of crappy brown food. The colorful pictures of vegetables on the walls cheered me up and reminded me of my healthy days when I visited New York, which gave me strength. I thought to myself, "When I get out of the hospital, I'm going to make this!" I want to eat this when I get out of the hospital! I also began to have a strong desire for food.

After being discharged from the hospital, I was unable to leave my home for medical treatment, but I cooked and made sweets to entertain those who came to visit me.... Of all the things I could do at home, I think cooking was the one that allowed me to vent the complex feelings that I could not digest on my own.

As I took pictures of these dishes, I began to express the images of the people who came to visit me, or the worlds of their favorite picture books or movies, on the table. For example, when a friend of mine who sings had just had a newborn baby, I cooked and coordinated the table with the image of the baby and child, placed crayons in the world of the picture book with the food, hung colorful tape from the ceiling, and so on.... I simply had a desire to say, "I've never seen anything like this!" I also had a desire to have people say, "I've never seen anything like this!" Perhaps I was creating a dreamlike world for myself, who could not leave the house. At the time, a magazine editor saw the photos I was posting on Facebook and asked me about food styling, which was my first job.

It was around this time that I started "Food On A Photograph," a project to match actual ingredients to photographs and collage them on top of them. As I had more opportunities to work as a food stylist, I began to feel a little uncomfortable with myself for simply making food look delicious and beautiful. One day, I made avocado toast for lunch, and when I tried to capture it in a photo, I wondered if there was any interesting way to capture it. I happened to have my favorite Audrey Hepburn's photo album next to me, so I put the toast on Audrey's head. Then I thought, 'What? It's so cute, it looks like a hat! And I was hooked. I then put carrots shaved into a spiral shape on other photos, and it looked stylish, like a perm (laughs). I posted them on social media, and my friends around me said, "That's so funny!" So I continued to make artwork using women I admire as models, such as Adele, TLC, and Ariana Grande, in addition to Audrey.

Then, a woman I respect as the world's best food stylist, who lives in New York, happened to find my Audrey's work on Instagram, and she reposted it on social media! I was so happy that I decided, 'Let's go to New York! I decided to go to New York to make a zine of "Food On A Photograph" and give it away for free.

I went to a cookbook store that specializes in cookbooks, which is considered the oldest in New York City, and was told, "If you make such a well-made zine, you should sell it properly. You mean I can sell it?" (laughs). From there, I went door-to-door to bookstores in New York and Los Angeles to hand-sell the book, and as a result, not a single store turned me down.

The exhibition "Food On A Model," which will open on Wednesday, April 24, 2019, is a collaboration that came about after a model I met during my stay in New York last year contacted me saying that she had found Kaoru's zine in a bookstore and was very inspired by it and wanted to do something together. The models around her, who were around 20 years old, were also very interesting, and I was conscious of creating a work that would express their characters and culture. It is a challenging series of work that confronts photography and food from a different angle than Audrey's.