From the archive
28 Sep 2026
Naoki Matsuda sculpted a human skull from grains of rice in 2013, as a way of thinking about rice farming. Then it went into storage, and there it stayed for years. When he retrieved it for an exhibition in Tokyo this autumn, insects had eaten their way through half of it. He put it on display exactly as he found it, sealed in a transparent case, chewed grains and all. What he had made as a reflection had become, without any help from him, a demonstration.
The show is NAFAS, staged at BUoY, a raw concrete art centre in Tokyo, from 4 to 26 September. It is the travelling offspring of the Invisible Dog, a Brooklyn art centre that lost its building over a year ago and has worked itinerantly ever since. Its founder Lucien Zayan, curator and sometime chef, started NAFAS in New York in 2022 around the meeting of art and food. "Nafas, in Arabic, means breath," he says, and also the gift some cooks have of making dishes exceptional rather than merely good.
Most of the work was made for the occasion by young Japanese artists, and much of it circles the same question: where does material go. Moéko compressed waste, mostly plastic, picked up on a journey east from Tokyo to Ibaraki into a single dense sculpture. Shogo Chazono stitched gargantuan pizzas from recycled fabric and found objects. Nanami Hayashi dotted 298 gilded wooden blocks with tiny painted ramen bowls, one per remembered meal.
Two workshops took the waste cycle further. California-based Tara de la Garza showed participants how to fuse the city's abundant plastic bags and packaging into a pliable sheet material, which they folded, origami-style, into lanterns. Kao Okada pushed the loop hardest of all, leading a workshop in which participants baked biscuits bound with ash, in uneasy homage to an Okinawan war survivor's account of starvation.
BUoY's café stayed busy through it all, with visitors eating cake in front of the ramen paintings and a poet swallowing a strip of his own rice-paper manuscript at the close of his reading. But the skull kept its own counsel in its case. Everything else in the building staged the cycle of making, consuming and returning; the skull simply underwent it, without an artist statement, without a workshop fee.
Fused-bag sheet: layer clean carrier bags between baking paper and press with a medium iron for a few seconds until they bond into a workable 'pleather', then cut and fold. The material is free, the kit is already in the kitchen, and a lantern takes an evening.
Makery · Read the source