The Price of Convenience

After moving to the U.S. from Japan, I began to eat more meat. I started cooking for myself more often, which meant that I routinely went to the supermarket. On one trip to the supermarket, I picked up a pack of meat and wondered—what is this? A product? A dead animal?

Nowadays, convenience is everything, and we don’t think about where our food comes from. But when we slow down, the impact is clear—36 million living, breathing cattle slaughtered each year in the United States alone. It is the numbness that we feel on the subject of meat that made me want to make meat the subject of my art.

The reason why I continues to draw meat is because through continued observation I believe it is possible to get closer and closer to the motif in its truest form. By limiting myself to a monochromatic palette, I finds it's able to better capture the object in front of me and highlight unique contours, lines, and shadows. By immersing myself in this monochromatic world, I notices the beautiful textures and patterns of flesh.

The day may come when people look back on this era of uncultured, non-substitute ”natural, living meat" and see it as a luxury that they can no longer easily afford. I hopes that by through my art, viewers will feel that there is something worth seeing in what they have continually overlooked.